March 15 – May 26, 2019
Curator: Nikola Kusovac
The exhibition of sculptures by Svetomir Arsić Basara is organized to mark the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. As his previous retrospective exhibition at the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts was organized in 1998, this time the works he produced between 1998 and 2018 will again be exhibited in the same venue.
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 a large number of solo exhibitions, produced numerous monuments and received many awards. He taught at the Department of Sculpture of the Academy of Arts in Priština and was later its Dean. He organized an art colony at Dečani, participated in many gatherings of sculptors and made a number of study trips. He is one of the most important artists in the history of Serbian sculpture. Wood and iron are his favorite materials.
His oeuvre developed from expressionist works to associative abstraction. Since the early 1980s, his creative work, as he himself points out, has been closely tied with the fate of his people. It became committed, with strong emphasis on the spiritual and national being.
As art historian and curator of the exhibition Nikola Kusovac has observed, Basara belongs to the circle of artists who draw the strength for the survival of the deepest layers of their creative work from their native, Kosovo soil, their ancestors, and the primeval beauty, drama and tragedy of their native land. The need to delve into the depths of the earth – towards ourselves and our own roots – came to Basara quite naturally as a response to the age we live in.
Since 1999, Svetomir Arsić Basara has lived and worked in Belgrade.
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