World Beyond the Picture at Gallery Novembar

World Beyond the Picture at Gallery Novembar

Exhibition of drawings, sculptures and art installations by Radoš Antonijević, named World Beyond the Picture will be presented in Novembar Gallery.
What makes this exhibition of artworks special is the fact that, for the first time in his career, the artist is presenting his drawings to the audience. Exhibited artworks are presenting a kind of fragmentary resume of an artistic continuum through different media and enabling a multilayered analysis of his complex artistic opus. Furthermore, the exhibition is showing his desire to experiment and reach wider possibilities of understanding and presenting specific topics. Since 2000s, Radoš Antonijević has researched the complexity of sculpture as the medium in contemporary art, questioning in his artworks issues of materiality, as well as the usage and perception of objects and forms from his surroundings. Those objects are always connected to personal experience, and they are shown through historical, cultural and socio-political narratives. The new artworks show the subtle change of narrative and artistic manner but also the change in the treatment of ideas, objects and pictures connected to consumer culture. Artist contextualizes objects, giving them new meanings, that often come out spontaneously from the interreaction among objects where new meaning is created with authentic testimony about the objects.

With this exhibition, the artist brings out his personal statement about the aesthetic domination of objects and pictures in the consumerist culture of today’s society. As a form of resistance to their “sweetened” forms and content, he offers “bitter” artistic comment on the doctrine of Western civilization that is lead by consumerism. His artworks are creating a web of questions and responses about social reality, mass production, and consumption, as well as collective and personal memory. Space, form, and object, with their symbolic values, and the artist’s conceptual approach create his individual mythologies, “plays with a taste of myth” as Levy-Stross would say when describing the existential purpose of life, which is also the essence of Antonijević’s poetics.

Radoš Antonijević (1969) studied sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he earned his Master’s as well as PHD degree. Since 2001 he has worked at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade as an associate professor as well at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka since 2000. Antonijević has actively exhibited since 1998 and has had over 20 solo and 50 group exhibitions. The most representative solo exhibitions took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Banja Luka in 2017 and at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 2015, while his selected group exhibitions were at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest in 2014, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 2012, at the Styria Autumn 2009 in Graz and at the October Salon in Belgrade in 2003, 2004 and 2006.