Dragomir Ugren

Dragomir Ugren graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1978. In addition to producing his own art work, he took part in the management of galleries and museums, as a curator of Visual Encounters in Subotica, an associate of the Most Gallery in Novi Sad, the city in which he has been the director of the Gallery of Contemporary Arts since 1992, and then the director Museum of Contemporary Arts of Vojvodina. He was an editor in the Novi Sad-based Prometheus Publishing House as well as the founder of the Projeka/r/t magazine in Novi Sad between 1993 and 2001. He had solo exhibitions (until 2000) in Celje, Subotica, Belgrade (in the Youth Center Gallery in 1990, and in the Student Cultural Center Gallery in 1995 and 1997), in Novi Sad (in the Golden Eye Cultural Centre in 1994, 1995 and 1997), in Budapest (in the Dorottya Gallery in 1997) and others. He was a participant of the following thematic and problem-oriented exhibitions: Other Yugoslav Documents, Sarajevo (1989), Early Nineties, Novi Sad, Podgorica (1993), Tendencies of the Nineties: Hiatuses of Modernism and Postmodernism, Novi Sad, Belgrade (1995-1996), Examples of Abstract Art: A Radical History, Belgrade (1995), Transgressional Forms of the Nineties, Vršac (1995), Damnjan-Gagović-Ugren-Vujačić, Lindner Gallery, Vienna (1999), and others.

Ugren’s painterly approach assumes experience of minimalism and it was created in an atmosphere of “survival of painting in the age of mass media“, “painting after the death of painting“, “painting after the completion of the modernist paradigm“, but also within a possibility of the renewal of painting apart from the dominant postmodernistic type of figurative and narrative “new painting“. Ugren reduced his painting to a tautological level of identifying the visible with the semantic sense, in line with the following statement by the artist: “My painting represents exactly that which can be seen – nothing more. A point is a point, a line is a line, color is painting“. Adhering to formalistic principles in his own painterly practice, Ugren added to them and overcame them through his engagement in the institutions of the “system of art“, thus reaffirming that it was possible to preserve one’s autonomy of artistic language and, at the same time, put into practice an activist behavior of a progressive cultural and artistic hard-working enthusiast.