Miloš Bajić

Miloš Bajić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, and completed his postgraduate studies in 1949 in Belgrade where he then was a professor (until 1979). He exhibited for the first time in 1945, at an exhibition staged in the Art Pavilion where works made in the Banjica concentration camp were shown. He had his first solo exhibition in the ULUS Gallery in 1952. He was a member of the Independents in 1951 and the December Group (1955-1960). Bajić took part in the auteur exhibition by Lazar Trifunović entitled Abstract Painting in Serbia 1951-1970 staged in the Belgrade Cultural Centre in 1971. He had retrospective exhibitions in the Cvijeta Zuzorić Art Pavilion (1993) and in the National Museum (2000). Posthumously, last shows of his work were held in the RTS (Radio-Television Serbia) Gallery (2015) and Officers’ Club Gallery (2017).

In Bajić’s voluminous oeuvre, abstract landscape painting (Kotor I, and Kotor II, 1955), associative abstraction (the Thickets series, 1961), and abstraction with attributes of free action occupy key positions. According to M. B. Protić, Bajić was considered “the first abstract painter of his generation“ an opinion shared within the circle of members of the December Group. Bajić put forth his understanding of abstraction in detail and with a great deal of precision in an interview with Ivana Simeonović Ćelić (Visual Notebooks, No. 9, Belgrade, 1988): “I was running away from a motif, yet it was, again, in some ways, present. On the other occasion I would take a motif, and then distance it from reality… In my abstract paintings, I achieved that point of annuling any kind of realistic reprsentation. I was freeing myself from any burden of the object, whether the associativeness moved towards the organic or towards the geometric… In the beginning, the abstraction was closer to harmony and a musical ratio, and a modulation of a tone… I tried to solve the inner building of a structure but not in a geometric manner… The structure resolved the ratio between colors and plans, rhythm, expressive gesture, and entered the space of informalism…“. Lazar Trifunović excluded Bajić from his historical review of the Belgrade Art Informel, while Djordje Kadijević described him as “a personality of unusual structure, a composed spirit, deliberate and systematic in his final judgements, upredictable, and often improvisationally hazardous in his realization“. In the Thickets (1961), April Variant, Dark Variant I, Dark Variant II (1962) paintings as well and others, he was the only person in the postwar Serbia abstract painting scene who applied the technique of dripping. After his abstract phase, he oriented himself towards figuration invoking his own memories using his authentic drawings made in the concentration camp in 1944.