Exhibition ’Vlaho Bukovac – The Art of Timeless Beauty’

After two-year preparations, the exhibition of Academician Vlaho Bukovac’s paintings titled ‘Vlaho Bukovac – The Art of Timeless Beauty’ is to open at the SASA Gallery, on Thursday, 24 December, at 10 a.m. With this exhibition, the author of this major project – Igor Borozan, Ph.D., associate professor at the Department of History of Art of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade – wanted to shed light on the significance of Bukovac’s work in the Serbian culture milieu.  Professor Borozan is also the author of a scholarly monograph, as well as the accompanying catalogue of the exhibition entitled ‘Artistic Transformations of Vlaho Bukovac in the Context of European Painting’.

The display of selected works of Vlaho Bukovac at the SASA Gallery was envisaged per a concept of everlasting beauty.  The representation of idealized nature essentially marked the work of the Dalmatian painter, trained on academic and humanistic ideals of the Academy in Paris. The exhibited paintings created in the period 1878-1922 are the results of the ideas (symbolism, orientalism, and scientific positivism) and stylistic expressions (academic realism, divisionism, and impressionism) of that time. Portraits, royal portraits, nudes, and genre painting showcase both the painter’s need to continually transform and dynamic artistic and cultural life in Europe.

The exhibition is mainly based on Bukovac’s works from domestic art collections (The National Museum in Belgrade, Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection, The Gallery of Matica Srpska, The Fine Art Collection of the Royal Compound in Dedinje, The Museum of Yugoslavia, Odbrana Media Center, the House of Jevrem Grujić, the Museum of the Rudnik and Takovo Region from Gornji Milanovac), along with fifteen works from the region (Modern Gallery from Zagreb, the National Gallery from Ljubljana, The House of Vlaho Bukovac, Serbian Church Municipality in Dubrovnik, private collections).

The exhibition being held at the SASA Gallery symbolically attests to the painter’s affiliation to the SASA: a corresponding member of the Serbian Learned Society in 1884; an honorary member of the Serbian Royal Academy in 1892 and a full member of the Serbian Royal Academy in 1905.

The project was financially supported by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia and the Secretariat for Culture of the City of Belgrade.