BIOGRAPHY
Veljko Vučković was born in 1994 in Gornji Milanovac, Serbia. He completed his master’s degree in the class of Professor Nikola Božović at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, Applied Painting department. He finished his doctoral studies in 2023 under the mentorship of Professor Ivan Grubanov. After being employed as a teaching associate (2019–2024), he is currently working as an assistant professor at the same institution (2024–). He has exhibited his works in 17 solo exhibitions and 142 group exhibitions at regional and international levels.
He received the 1st „Prisma Art Prize“ Award, „Vladimir Veličković“ Foundation Drawing Award, „Momčilo Moma Marković“ Award for best small-format drawing, the third prize from the „Niš Art Foundation“ and commendation from the jury at the 14th International Biennial of Miniature Art in Gornji Milanovac. His works are held in private and institutional collections both domestically and internationally. He is represented by Drina Gallery (Belgrade, Serbia) and Aria Art Gallery (Florence, Italy). He currently lives and works in Belgrade.
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
The appropriation and transformation of film clips are central in my exploration of the mediums of drawing and painting. The point of departure for my artworks are political films made mostly in late 60’s and early 70’s. Revitalizing information absorbed from them, I am primarily interested in creating works capable of evoking subtle associations with social and political events.
The potential for unlimited reproduction of media images in my artistic process serves as an endless source for further manipulation and technical processing. The creation process involves selecting, appropriating, and deconstructing film frames, thorough digital editing of fragments, montage, collage, and then transferring them onto paper and canvas. This so-called post-digital artistic gesture applies an „archaeological” approach in selecting templates that are meticulously reviewed, digitally reorganized, and materialized using traditional drawing and painting techniques.
My artworks do not provide a wealth of data – their communicative language is multivalent. As a result, viewers are never entirely certain in interpreting the object of the painting. The fact that it does not stop at a one-dimensional message leads us through the deconstruction of existing to the construction of new dimensions. In other words, my pieces reside in a floating interstice between the original context and the potential for alternative interpretations, facilitating mutual approximation of potential conclusions. Thus, the artist becomes an investigator in the process of creating the drawing and painting, while the viewer, absorbing its content, completes interpretations.
As a snapshot is a basis for my artworks, we could suggest that the images I use for my works are somehow nomadic – they move from one media to another. I decided to use grey tones since they refer to capitalism, in which everything is grey – photography, film, press, television, computers, screens etc. It was Michel Pastoureau who called grey the colour of capitalism. Since we live in a world that is flooded with all kinds of imagery that can be endlessly copied in digital forms, I turned to drawing and painting following the idea that thus a drawing or painting are unique objects, one of a kind. Since there is also a manual gesture involved, we can assume that the new work of art then has its own „aura“ (as Walter Benjamin put it).
This painting is based on a frame from Damiano Damiani’s 1975 drama film „Why a Magistrate is Killed“ (it. „Perché si uccide un magistrato“), starring Franco Nero and Françoise Fabian.
It is a part of a series of artworks that I have been working on for several years, which were also the subject of my PhD project at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, titled „After the Original – Painting Between Reproduction and Property“. Consisting of a large number of canvases, parts of this body of work were presented at multiple solo exhibitions in Serbia – last one being „Wheels That Never Spin“, an exhibition that took place in Drina Gallery in Belgrade last year (curated by Nataša Radojević, essay by Azu Nwagbogu). Futhermore, besides being shown at numerous group exhibitions abroad, these pieces were recently displayed at StART KX art fair in London and Art Madrid in Spain. The painting that I am applying with was exhibited in Madrid.