EXHIBITIONS
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EXHIBITIONS
Andrej Bjelic’s Lions on Wires featuring works in their very own primal state – an exhibition showing the young Belgrade artist’s latest series. The works of the series share a centered and balanced composition and a plain white or beige background, which is crisscrossed by the thin line of a shaking wire. Adapting and following the course of the wire, each lion finds his own way of keeping the balance. Illustrated with just a few simple lines and strokes, the viewer can sense a stressing feeling of instability facing the threatening abyss on both sides of the wire.
Sometimes, life is a walk on the tightrope. And just as life, art is a walk on the tightrope, too. Bjelic’s lions balance between expectation and disappointment, between hope and free fall. Antigravity art at its best. Bjelic’s exhibition offers art in its raw, primal state with all its primitiveness and animalistic forms outside the realm of traditional symbolism.
On display from March 18 to April 28, with admission free for all humans, lions and other lovers of art.
Curated by Denis Leo Hegic in collaboration with Ksenija Samardzija and Saša Marčeta Foundation.
Born in 1996 in Aleksinac, Serbia, Bjelic moved to Belgrade with his family. Today he lives in New Belgrade with girlfriend, dog and cats.
Andrej Bjelic has been painting and drawing for as long as he can remember, inspired by the sense of self, perception of the world, and the special people and animals that have shaped his life.
In 2021 he graduated as a graphic designer from the Belgrade Metropolitan University, Faculty of Digital Arts. After completing his formal education, however, he decided to devote his talent to painting as his true passion.
If you are looking for visual art to rest your eyes upon, delight and quench your thirst for visual nourishment, in most cases you will be capable of finding it. But the experience will remain unsatisfactory if the shell is not filled with curatorial paradogms. Andrej Bjelic navigates these streams of influence with great confidence.
His autonomy is being based on unbridled curiosity and the joy that comes with discovering any new technique. There are no layers of über-intellectualization. It is pure color, paste and spray upon each other. Bjelic’s works stand against the tides of banality and forced positivity that threaten to swamp the contemporary art market.
Does their primitiveness affirm the universal values of autodidactic art as a permanent canon or does it perhaps take the exact opposite view: invalidating primitivism as a derivation of external causation? At some level, the Lions on Wires exhibition commits to embracing that very question by answering it before it’s actually asked. And hiding it behind a multitude of curtains in space, and layers of paint on canvas. I am aware that the simplicity was the bait for the show – but nobody ever promised the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition. In Bjelic’s exhibition we offer art in its raw, primal state with all its primitiveness and animalistic forms outside the realm of traditional symbolism.
We may seek the celebration of lion power, but I fear we might find only an ease so foreign to the ruler of the animal kingdom. Bjelic’s lions balance between expectation and disappointment, between hope and free fall. Anti-gravity art at its best.
Denis Leo Hegic
Curator
After a notable exhibition held last year at Cinema Balkan (2022), where Andrej Bjelic presented a series of works thematically unified under the title Fiery Pets – paintings of fantastic, tamed dragons, unicorns, and unusual pets with unique names and characters – this new series brings a different approach; a considerably milder one, with the color scheme of white lions enriched with pastel tones and blue manes, as they navigate in playful poses on an unstable wire. Remarkably painterly, thick pasty layers are conveyed through the idea of simplicity in the artist’s painting experience that relies on drawing, where the initial instance is a series of 12 sketches (A5 format), which are exhibited alongside six paintings in this exhibition. The line carries the basic structure, hidden by dense layers of color and occasionally lingering in the field of the painting – visible and precious as an interpreter of details in the rough simplicity of the narrative.
The novelty that Andrej applies is the introduction of space by gently emphasizing the shadow of the wire, while the illusion of spatial planes is achieved despite the confinement of the figure within the painting field. Body malformations and movements arise from adapting to the canvas surface and a nearly childlike interpretation of animal anatomy. However, all of this combined, in contrast to the means that Andrej uses and his consistency in creativity, forms an ultimate impression of immediacy, while the presence of endearing clumsiness and confusion invites us to play.
It is precisely in the sentimental exchange and understanding of the visual discourse that offers the immediacy of Bjelic’s dual nature – strength and playfulness, domination and joy, roughness and gentleness – that the impressions and suggestions of closeness that we intuitively develop towards these canvases remain mixed.
Ksenija Samardzija
Curator
