Untitled_U10artspace_2016

For years, I believed art was a weapon for freedom. I spent countless nights in BIGZ, a once-legendary hub of Belgrade’s underground art scene, where creativity thrived in chaotic and unfiltered forms. Inside that massive, decaying structure, I painted, debated, and watched as artists transformed abandoned spaces into something raw and alive. It was a place where music, performance, and visual art collided—where we believed in art’s power to exist beyond systems. But even as I immersed myself in this world, I began to sense a contradiction: the very images we created in defiance of institutions would eventually find themselves inside them. Was art truly independent, or was it always bound to the structures it sought to resist? This realization didn’t arrive as a sudden disillusionment, but rather as a shift in perspective—one that profoundly shaped the work I presented in my solo exhibition, Untitled (2016), at U10 Art Space.

This exhibition became a reflection of that turbulent moment—a period of artistic and personal transformation. The works in Untitled embody a series of frenetic jumps: from the underground to institutional spaces, from ecstatic joy to deep uncertainty, from victory to loss. I wanted to capture these extremes through painting—not as separate ideas, but as a single experience in constant flux. In these works, my process became deliberately reckless and automatic, layering materials in a way that blurred intention and impulse. I borrowed freely from popular culture, art history, and personal symbols, allowing these references to collide on the canvas. One moment, I was channeling the energy of neo-expressionist painting—where the physical act of painting itself became a performance. The next, I was subverting expectations, playing with compositional references to high art and its rigid traditions.

In this way, my work exists between contradiction and transition. I was fascinated by the idea of “updating expression”—of taking the urgency of gestural mark-making and confronting it with contemporary forms of image-making. As Velimir Popović noted in his analysis of my work, I was exploring a kind of cyclical process, where each series served as a response to the last, continuously evolving. Painting no longer felt like a finished statement, but rather a site of perpetual revision. In some ways, this was my way of keeping that underground spirit alive—by refusing to let any image feel static or resolved.

At the same time, Untitled was also a deeply personal exhibition. While I was creating this body of work, I left Belgrade for an artist residency in Paris, searching for the kind of art I had always believed in. But I found something unexpected: the unsettling possibility that maybe the art I was looking for never existed at all. This realization forced me to reconsider not just art, but my own place within it. I began questioning what it meant to move between artistic worlds—to shift between subcultures and institutions, between instinct and critique. These tensions shaped the visual language of the exhibition. Each piece in Untitled embodies a collision of opposites—formal precision clashing with raw expression, polished surfaces disrupted by chaotic gestures. Some paintings exude an almost ecstatic energy, while others carry the weight of uncertainty and exhaustion. The entire exhibition felt like a pendulum swing between emotional and artistic extremes.

Looking back, Untitled was a turning point for me. It was the moment when I began to see art not as something fixed, but as something constantly in motion—something that resists definition even as it takes form. The idealism I carried from BIGZ didn’t disappear, but it changed. I no longer saw art as a singular act of defiance, but as a continuous negotiation between freedom and structure. This realization didn’t weaken my belief in art; it made it more complex, more nuanced.