Veljko Vujačić

Veljko Vujačić graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1994. The same year he took part in the First Biennale of Youth in the Concordia Center for Contemporary Culture in Vršac as well as in the Perspectives XXII exhibition in the Student Cultural Center (SKC) Gallery, Belgrade. He had his solo exhibitions in the Student Cultural Center (SKC) Gallery in 1993, 1996, 1997, and 2000, and in the Lindner Gallery in Vienna in 1999, in the Zvono Gallery 2009, and in the Gallery 73 in 2012. He participated in the Transgressional Forms of the 1990s exhibitions in Vršac, in Colony in Brežice (Slovenia) in 1999, at a group exhibition with Radomir Damnjan, Vesko Gagović, and Dragomir Ugren in the Golden Eye Gallery in Novi Sad in 2000, as well as in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Pančevo in 2001, and also in the On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989-2001 exhibition staged in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 2005. Given the circumstantial social, political and basic living conditions in Serbia in the 1990s, it was unusual and surprising that a then young artist should exhibit fully abstract, almost minimalistic paintings where and when one would expect an “engaged“ art with protesting content and protesting messages. However, the abstraction of Veljko Vujačić was not only not, allegedly, “outside time and space“ but it was precisely in a very particular manner expressing a fully specific conviction that, despite everything, then and further on, it was worth working and believing in “pure“ art of classic painting instruments and procedures, as a proof of “survival of painting“ in the milieu of all the more frequent applications of new technical and mass-media “motion pictures“. This was, namely, about painting created at the crossroads between the tenet of “reductive and fictional“, “sensuality and rationality“, at spacious surfaces covered by light layers of paste, measured but not stiff, and with a free hand executed geometry, which was, at any rate, understandable and justified given the previous period of the 1980s passed under the sign of pluralistic postmodernism. This also gave the reason to put forward a theses prompted by this (and similar) painting regarding a „abstraction painted non-programmatically“ in the wider domestic and international context of the so-called “second modernism“.