Zoran Petrović

Zoran Petrović graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts with a specialist course in Belgrade in 1949 where he then was a professor in a painting course. He started exhibiting in 1953, and had a solo exhibition entitled Remembrances and Daydreaming in the Graphic Arts Collective Gallery in 1955. He was a member of the Independents and of the December Group. He participated in numerous exhibitions of the contemporary Yugoslav art abroad, at the VI Mediterranean Biennale in Alexandria in 1957, and in the VI Biennale in Sao Paolo in 1961 where he was awarded for his drawing. He took part in Lazar Trifunović’s Abstract Painting in Serbia 1951-1970 auteur exhibition staged in the Cultural Centre Gallery in 1971. He also had solo exhibitions in the Modern Gallery Salon in 1962, in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1970, as well as in the Belgrade Cultural Center Gallery in 1977. There was a retrospective of his work in the Cvijeta Zuzorić Art Pavilion in 1984.

He was simultaneously involved with painting, drawing and sculpture in metal as a discipline in which he would, according critical evaluations, achieve top-notch creations and very interesting innovations. According to M. B. Protić, “a machine with antrohopological attributes served as a bridge towards a vision which, no matter how abstract in a stylistical sense, retains in itself all seriousness of a complex intention to which his respect of a traditional craft also contributes… His canvases mark a transition from organic into inorganic and vice versa. This is no longer painting related to objects but rather to processes…“. According to Z. Pavlović, “his paintings… theoretically and morphologically viewed, cannot be abstract, oriented towards non-geometric or lyrical abstraction which is permeated with certain noble traditionalistic sensibility of picturality“ which can be seen in the Craving Pointed Levers painting (1977) that possesses thematic and formal attributes by which emancipated and almost abstract forms possess ve and keep their distant origin in associative starting points.

Zoran Petrovic

Craving Pointed Levers (1977)

oil and lacquer on canvas,

185 cm x 136 cm