Dušan Junačkov

Junačkov graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1979, and completed his postgraduate studies in 1982 when he exhibited for the first time, in the Graphic Arts Collective Gallery. Numerous collective and solo exhibitions followed: in the Cultural Center Gallery (1991), Zepter Gallery (1995), ULUS Gallery (2001), the Pavilion in the Niš Fortress (2007), the Belgrade Sales Gallery (2010). There was also a posthumous retrospective of his works in the Cultural Center Gallery in Vršac (2012), entitled Works 2003-2012 selected from the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad (2018).

Dušan Junačkov’s painting of the mature stage of his oeuvre was very distinct by large formats of thick layers of black matter created by complex operative methods in combined techniques, set up in such a way in gallery space so that the entirety of the exhibition was experienced as an installation made up of individual paintings of identical size (225 cm x 205 cm).

According to its external characterstics, the painting of Junačkov could give rise to some comparisons with the heritage of historical informalism and recent neo-informalism, from whose attributes he essentially differed by intentions of creation and his specific meanings. Created by and large in the 1990s and early 2000s when it also achieved its pinnacle, this type of painting was, in fact, a consequence, not of the artist’s surroundings and circumstances, but rather of his inner existential mood. It was done in such a way that the artists, sheltered from an insight of the public, in the space of the studio, like a unique performance, spent his time of spiritual and physical existence by painting, intensively. According to a testimony of the artist himself, this kind of painting originated from the source of multifaceted knowledge, ranging from his interest in film and philosophy of ancient oriental teachings to that by contemporary nihilists, so that all those numerous and other intimate experiences would stay impressed and sublimated in magma of vast black matter.