Svetomir Arsić Basara exhibition opened
The exhibition of sculptures by academician Svetomir Arsić Basara, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the artist’s birth, was opened in the SASA Gallery. Since his previous retrospective exhibition at the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts was held in 1998, his works, produced in the period 1998-2018, will be again on display in the same venue. The honour of exhibition opening was bestowed upon academician Ljubisav Rakić.
A sculptor, art teacher and theoretician, Svetomir Arsić Basara was born in the village of Sevce in Kosovo. He produced his first work A little girl’s head in clay, in 1950. Since then, he has had numerous solo exhibitions, created various, significant monuments and received many awards. He is one of the most important names in the history of contemporary Serbian sculpting. He prefers using wood and iron as his chosen materials.
In the article A patriot, industrious, persistent and involved – Svetomir Arsić Basara, the curator of the exhibition, Nikola Kusovac observes that a whole notion of Svetomir Arsić Basara’s life work can be understood when his brilliant, artistic biography is set against his arduous, hardship abundant and full of ordeals life. It is simply baffling how, by fortunate twist of fate, a poor, half-starved peasant child managed to attend primary school, become a village servant, an underage worker in a mine and a kid partisan in the Second Brigade of Kosovo from 1942 till 1944, when he was demobilized due to his youth, and to graduate from a lower comprehensive school obviously according to a compressed programme for the war hindered, and enrol at the School of Applied Arts in Niš, in 1948.” Several years later, Svetomir Arsić Basara enrolled at the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade (1953). In the following years, he organized art colony in Dečani, lectured at the Academy of Arts, Department of Sculpting, in Priština, where he was later elected a dean, attended various sculpting festivals and study visits.
His opus developed from expressive works to associative abstraction (sculptures Association, Icarus, Phoenix, Game of Shapes, as well as the cycle of Vertical variations). As the artist himself declares, since the early 1980s, his creative work has been intrinsically linked to the fate of his people. It has become involved, focused on the spiritual and national being, connected to Kosovo, Kosovo mythology and trials and tribulations (sculptures Mother Serbia, cycle of (Un)merciful Angel, Sword in Christ’s Hand). In his accession speech (he was elected a full member of SASA in 1994) he said: “I do not look upon the world as a role model but upon the environment I live in, from whence I came from; by focusing on the tradition of my people, I search for identity, proof of origin, right to the future” while in 2005 (In pursuit of my own roots – Glas SANU 400-8) he penned: “Under the sky of my native Kosovo, a slightest stimulus to my creative zest is enough to turn a sculpture into a torchlight of dancing shapes and translate turbulent waves of emotions into realization of epic characters from our glorious past.”