Maestro Denić in the museum

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01 Jul

Aleksandar Denić’s exhibition “Maestro Denić in the Museum” was opened in the Montenegrin Art Gallery “Miodrag Dado Đurić” in Cetinje, organized by the National Museum of Montenegro.

The curator of the exhibition, art historian Ljiljana Karadžić, characterized the exhibition as a kind of outsider intrusion into the museum space, which brought a touch of real life with all the trivia that is currently dominant in our societies, such as the phenomenon of turbofolk, variety show, daily politics, and which are considered inappropriate and unworthy of reflection and presentation in cultural institutions.

– Museums should enter into a dialogue with everyday life, with the current moment characterized by virtual life on networks where exhilaration and fatigue alternate with hyperinflation of public figures and events that quickly replace and suppress each other, or merge into strange hybrids in which one gets lost the border between the real and the fictitious or falsified. Denic’s visual essays, grammatically incorrect in the artistic sense, close to the underground expression, offer the observer a direct encounter with these phenomena, encouraging him to change his vision. The drawings and paintings were made on cheap paper, canvases, which are an adequate mise-en-scène for the heroes and anti-heroes who create our reality. Through paradoxical combinations of characters and phenomena from political, cultural, entertainment and fictitious life, he creates, with the obligatory addition of mimes, jokes, strange writings, Denić, without irony or restraint, creates works that can amuse, annoy, confuse you, but can also serve as a guide for navigating a devastated society – Karadžić pointed out and added that his work is above political correctness, above social conventions, somewhere halfway between the trivial and the spiritual, between turbofolk and the French new wave.

As part of the exhibition, Luka Papić’s award-winning film “Without” (2022) was shown, in which Denić appears as the main protagonist.

Aleksandar Denić was born in 1983 in Belgrade. He finished high school for design in Belgrade in 2002, and graduated from the Higher School of Fine and Applied Arts in Belgrade in 2006. He is a permanent member of the Matriarchy art collective. He has had nine solo exhibitions so far. He is a participant in several festivals, among others, the Crack Festival in Rome, the Vendetta Festival in Marseille and the Novo Doba Festival in Belgrade. In addition to painting, he is engaged in making fanzines and screen printing.

The exhibition can be viewed until July 20, 2023.