This fall, at two locations – Gallery of Student Cultural Center and ARTE Gallery at Andrićev venac 12, ARTE Gallery presents seven artists whose exceptional creative contribution marked the art of the second half of the last century.

Radomir Damnjanović Damnjan, Branko Miljuš, Radomir Reljić, Dragoš Kalajić, Dušan Otašević, Peđa Nešković and Bora Iljovski are names known to the public today for their complex and voluminous creative work. Their individual oeuvres reflect diverse artistic expressions, but over a long period these artists, although never formally connected as a group, jointly integrated into a new current that was developing, which critics most precisely defined as a New Objecthood.

In the 1950s, the Belgrade art scene was dominated by abstract art expressed through the work of representatives of Art Informel and Geometric Abstraction of the Decembar Group, and as a counterweight to Abstract Art, the Mediala Group was formed. At the beginning of the sixties, a new tendency appeared that directed a group of young authors in the direction of searching for new forms of expression in the context of a return to subject painting. Similar phenomena developed simultaneously in Europe and America, and the new phenomena were terminologically determined differently – New Figuration, New Narrative, New Image, New Reality of the Object, New Symbol, and as one of the types of these new expressions appeared the British, and then and American, Pop Art. The artistic phenomena that developed in this context in our cultural environment can be united precisely under the term defined by Ješa Denegri – new subjectivity.

The artists who will be exhibited at this exhibition represent the most important protagonists of tendencies within the New Objecthood. Although they did not act as a formal group, their close connection, mutual influences and frequent joint exhibitions connect them as representatives of that new wave of painting. The return of interest to the object, figure, narrative, sign and symbol represents a new and refreshing chapter in art history, and this phenomenon had a profound impact on the development of art in the second half of the twentieth century.