Djordje Ivačković: Crouching Harmony, Hidden Tension

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Double Q Gallery is pleased to present Crouching Harmony, Hidden Tension, a solo exhibition of the late French-Serbian artist Djordje Ivačković (1930 – 2012). The exhibition features eight paintings from the 1980s, a period when Ivačković’s painting entered a new phase of development, characterised essentially by more intense colours, strong gestures, and more complex compositions. Crouching Harmony, Hidden Tension opens on 26 August and runs through 24 September.

As one of the most important elements of American culture in the post-World War II period, jazz was a major medium for the spread of American influence in Eastern Europe. As Ivačković himself recalled, “the Voice of
America radio station in Yugoslavia in the 1950s was ‘to blame’ for the influence West Coast jazz on me”. The young musician, who at that time only drew occasionally, was decisively influenced in his career when he encountered the works of the painters he had come to know – Schneider, Soulages, Mathieu, Zao Wou-Ki, then Kline, De Kooning, Pollock and other main figures of French lyrical abstraction and American abstract expressionism. What made the most lasting impression on Ivačković at these exhibitions was the analogy between his love of painting and jazz.

Ivačković spent more and more time painting and moved to Paris in 1961. After arriving in the French capital in 1963, he organised his first solo exhibition at the Le Soleil dans la tête gallery. This was the beginning of his friendship and collaboration with art critic Jean Jacques Lévêque and other artists who, similarly to him, were involved in jazz music. He participated on several occasions in exhibitions that brought together painters inspired by American music, and in the late 1960s he took part in one of the special multimedia evenings organised during Phil Woods’ tour of France. While Woods’ orchestra played, Ivačković painted his large- format paintings in front of the audience. The link between jazz and his abstract painting was most evident in the 1960s, but remained a constant and defining element of Ivačković’s artistic approach in the following decades.

The next period between 1972 and 1982 marked a turning point and a new era, which the artist himself described as a period of conceptual painting. Although his gestural method remained evident, Ivačković
focused on the structure of the painting and insisted that the artistic power of gestures and their pure relationship was the only content of the work. During this period, not only was his outstanding talent recognised by French art critics, but all the major French magazines and journals regularly published reports and reviews of his exhibitions and analyses of his art. It was also at this time that he became part of the Serbian and Yugoslav art historical canon in his own country.In the 1970s and 1980s, his work toured Slovenia, Macedonia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Philippines and New Zealand.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Born in Horgoš (Yugoslavia) in 1930, Djordje Ivačković graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade in 1955, and was also an avant-garde jazz musician. In the early 1960s, he emigrated to Paris, where he remained, working there as a painter until his death in 2012. His works are collected by renowned private and public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Serbia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, and the Collection Société Générale.