One of Serbia’s foremost contemporary artists, renowned across Europe, his works can be found in prestigious private and museum collections around the world – in Vienna, Paris, Chicago, Prague, Belgrade, Sofia… One of his works of monumental proportions and six smaller ones form part of the permanent collection of Vienna’s Albertina Museum, which is among the world’s largest museums. Beyond the borders of Serbia (and the territory of the former Yugoslavia), he has been largely acknowledged by the Populist Project, which he favours strongly as an opportunity for experimentation. He has become an apostle of populism
Shaped by his own experiences of the Belgrade underground, rock and punk scene, he mastered conceptualism in the art of the ‘70s and is today an urban character in the public eye, a lover of films and comics, a designer, radio host, guitarist, drummer of the punk band Urbana Gerila [Urban Guerrilla], actor, football fan, analyst and much more. Uroš Đurić (1964) is famous according to the Warhol model, but is actually an authentic local phenomenon, an expression of the spirit and talent of Serbia’s best face.
He has been awarded for his works of art at the October Salon, the Nadežda Petrović Memorial and the Youth Biennial, while he is also a winner of the Sava Šumanović Award, the Great Award of the Association of Independent Artists… Together with Zoran Panjković, he broadcast the last ever match of the legendary Diego Maradona on TV B92!
He is a descendant of the Đurić tribe, Kotar’s ‘Uskoks’, who joined the Venetians in May 1692 and settled on the territory of Plavno. They can also be found in Slavonia, Bosnia, the Sava and Morava river basins and in Bela Palanka. They have included numerous representatives of culture and science, members and vice-presidents of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, national representatives of Dalmatia in the organising of church affairs under Napoleon, while one of them even made it to play centre-forward for the Bosnian national team. His father was a painter, while his mother was an architect.
Starting school also implied his first formal encounter with the imposing of authority, which for him has been a serious problem ever since. History was his favourite subject. He was eight when he went to Studenica Monastery for the first time with his parents. When asked what kind of value system he grew up in and was raised under, he explains:
“I grew up as a mix of the polarities of Serbian ethnic territories. I was formed in a combination of two milieus: one based on the folk tradition, on an awareness of belonging to the community; the other in a milieu that was urban and modern in orientation. My father’s family moved from Dalmatia to Slavonia in the 19th century and established themselves there. He has been in Belgrade since 1941. My mother’s ancestors came originally from southern Serbia and were classical merchants in the best sense of the mercantile spirit, who settled in Dorćol in the early 20th century. And it was there in Belgrade that these two factions of ethnic Serbs met and were connected by strong aspirations for progress. My parents were people of a distinctly modern orientation. I was raised in accordance with Dr Spock’s book and grew up in a house that was constantly visited by a team that today represents the history of contemporary culture.”
The government doesn’t like nationally conscious people. It likes people who operate deftly within the scope of national stereotypes, and I’m not that type of guy
He says that he became conscious in the late 1960s and ‘70s, and that he couldn’t have wished for a better time to do so. This was a time marked by radical practices in the arts, the neoavant- garde, films of the new Hollywood, pop culture, the blossoming and peak of the social welfare society that had been conceived in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
“Those first 18 years of my life were spent in paradise. I went to the cinema when I was 12 to watch Rollerball and I listened to rock’n’roll, which meant that I was surrounded by art that questioned the relationship between repression and freedom in society. I grew up with the films of Bob Fosse and was 15 years old when I watched Altman’s 3 Women, Bertolucci’s La Luna, Polanski’s Tess, Wajda’s Maids of Wilko etc.”
He graduated from secondary design school, served in the army as a border guard – posted to the border between Yugoslavia and Italy, enrolled in art history studies and studied for a year, only to enrol in the Faculty of Fine Arts after returning from a short trip abroad. It is ordinary to fear entrance exams, particularly those for art colleges, but it didn’t bother him.
“The entrance exam that they had at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts was much more meaningful. Candidates there would be asked to explain their motivations, but that wasn’t the case here, so all sorts would pass. You had two days of sketching nudes, two days of drawing portraits and a day of painting still life, so what you did well would pass. That was nonsense that I opposed openly during my studies, but they immediately shut me down and I no longer spoke out.”
And then in 2024, on the occasion of the Day of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Uroš unveiled his exhibition as the premiere exhibition in the Alumni cycle of the renovated FFA Gallery, under the title Autonomism Here and Now. It marks the 13th anniversary of when he and Stevan Markuš jointly authored the Autonomism Manifesto. This was a touching moment of the return of a former student, who led the audience throughout the duration of the exhibition, but also through the space of legendary former nightclub Akademija, located in the basement of the FFA building, where he worked as a DJ during 1992/93.
A ball was the love of his childhood. His paternal grandfather had played for professional Hungarian football club Ferencvárosi prior to World War I, when the Hungarians were a football powerhouse. He can accurately list all the successes of the Hungary football team during the last century, not failing to mention the fact that Ferenc Puskás was one of the greatest strikers of all time. He sees football as being the greatest mirror of society, like no other sport.
“There were only Red Star fans around me in Mutapova Street and on Čubura. Rudinski’s son lived around the corner in Tamnavska Street, while Red Star and Partizan veterans would gather once a week at the Trandafilović Tavern. Seeing them there was phenomenal. They were all impeccably dressed, like gentlemen from the films of Italian neorealism. Cool, dignified and self-realised people, they were impressive in their appearance. That was also how they’d played.”
It was at 2022’s 59th October Salon that he exhibited his work Pižon at Highbury 1983.
“I went to serve in the army that year, and for my generation Pižon represented a personality who accumulated within him all our wishes and projections. He was the essence of what we considered not only success in football, but also achievement in life. I found the photo that I used to paint the picture on the Arsenal fans website, where they would discuss the present and the past, but also Pižon, as one of the most misunderstood players ever, and many among them regret his early departure to this day. He is considered to have brought with him a completely new approach to football in the UK, which the sport there didn’t know how to recognise and that Arsenal only managed to apply with the arrivals of Dennis Bergkamp and Arsène Wenger, meaning that Pižon was a trailblazer who was ahead of his time.”
When Berlinguer died, the left in the West seemed to lose its foundational pillar
He received an award at his first ever exhibition: the 32nd October Salon. It was a decision that freed him of the need to make a breakthrough and enabled him to navigate the artworld with certainty and attracting greater attention from within the profession.
“There is a paradox in the fact that that October Salon was held in the autumn of 1991. Three weeks later, at dusk on 9th November, I shot the first scene for the film We Are Not Angels and my mother passed away that night. It was the end of an idyllic family life, the end of Yugoslavia, the end of strolling through the world without a care and the end of the certainty of society, which I never again felt in the same way.”
As a rule, great artists know, feel and recognise the moment when they admit to themselves that they’ve finally succeeded. Uroš is convinced that his best works are yet to come, but he still looks back fondly.
“I found myself in Paris in the year 2000, for the first time after 14 years, in the city that shaped me to a great extent. I attended a school where French was the primary foreign language, and I also read comics and books in French. Then came the collapse of the country, wars, and I was gone for a long time. Thanks to the Bulgarians, who all but nurtured me as part of their own scene in the late ‘90s, I received an invitation to participate in a representative exhibition of Eastern European art. And so it was that I went to a place that I’d last been to as a student of art history, entering with a student card, and now I was exhibiting there: Jeu de Paume! I had an 18-month-old child back in the Milošević run homeland, while I have to spend the next five weeks in Paris with a group of the best Eastern European artists, because such was the programme. And I was among them. Everything seemed utterly surreal.”
He didn’t represent Serbia there, but he is a representative of Serbian society, and the side of Serbia with the most modern and exclusive reach. He found himself in Warsaw for the first time in the summer of 1988 and went to the Zachęta Gallery for the Poster Biennale. It was 12 years later that he returned space for the opening of his own exhibition. When he was selected for an exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthalle, together with Jeff Wall, David Hockney and Sonic Youth, his invasion of Austria began. And that conquest continues to this day, but that’s never really resonated with the Serbian public.
“Those kinds of things unfold best in silence. It was important to me that I can deal with something I care about, and to do so in a highly referential
way. The support I had here came from only a narrow circle of people who had at one point ploughed the field of ultra-modernity and been promptly removed. Here I’m referring to Dejan Sretenović, Lidija Merenik and the married couple the Dimitrijevićs, who worked at the Centre for Contemporary Art, and to Cultural Centre REX, which was established by Darka Radosavljević, B92, the Soros Foundation. If it weren’t for them, I’m not sure we’d even have the standards of contemporary art that we have today. None of them placed any conditions on me, particularly the eternally stigmatised Soros Foundation, with which I’ve had the best experiences.”
Yugoslavia was destroyed deliberately, and it is a lie to suggest that anyone wanted it to remain intact
He says that he’s a leftist, and that the left in our country has disappeared as a political factor, which also means that it can’t be used and abused.
“I’m a nationally conscious leftist, and the government doesn’t like nationally conscious people. It likes people who operate deftly within the scope of national stereotypes, and I’m not that type of guy. I don’t have a problem either with the fact that I’m a Serb or with the fact that I viewed the world from the position of a leftist. And that doesn’t suit anyone’s model.”
He is sure that the range of Serbian culture is the only thing the Serbian state could root itself in well, but it doesn’t do so.
“It’s important today that we understand the extent to which us and our tendencies are rooted in the phenomenon of the development of the Serbian cultural identity from three or four centuries ago, when we didn’t even have a state. It was at that time that a high level of community awareness was developed and maintained, precisely through cultural and spiritual identity. This is something that’s lacking to a great extent today. We have a state, but it’s too often the case that the ruling regimes treat culture contemptuously, despite the fact that it could really repair the poor image the state has in today’s world, by presenting itself through the context and range of artists.”
Speaking in an interview for the UK’s Channel 4 back in 1994, he coined the term ‘techno-feudalism’ to describe the state of global civilisation. There decades later, in 2023, famous economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis would author the book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
“That was a moment when technology was advancing inexorably, while social relations were regressing. When the people’s sovereignty begins slipping away like sand in through fingers. The disappearance of the civilisational gains of socialism linked to social justice and healthcare education, the right to work etc. Yugoslavia was destroyed deliberately, and it is a lie to suggest that anyone wanted it to remain intact. Despite all its shortcomings, it was a successful project; a positive role model for the majority of countries that had only liberated themselves from the shackles of the colonial powers a decade or two earlier. When [Italian Communist Party leader Enrico] Berlinguer died, the left in the West seemed to lose its foundational pillar. Many of the ideas of Eurocommunism were taken on by the right and incorporated into their concept of the European community, albeit cleansed of the impurities of leftist ideology. Instead of protecting the population, they created a trading company of enclosed protected interests.”
Uroš was recently invited to create an exhibition in the Republika Srpska city of Prijedor, in the city gallery that’s named after sculptor Sreten Stojanović, a member of the Young Bosnia movement and the brother of People’s Hero Mladen Stojanović. Uroš taught the General Art History of the Medieval Period to Sreten’s daughter Jovanka (today Maksimović) at the Faculty of Philosophy.
That offer delighted him:
“I like to work with local determining factors that are social, cultural, phenomenological, because to me it’s important that my work makes reference to the community. I thus connected this entire exhibition to Sreten Stojanović. That’s particularly important to me in these revisionist times. Sreten and his brother Mladen spent three years in prison as high school pupils, as members of Young Bosnia, and afterwards Sreten received a scholarship from Dr Đurica Đorđević and his wife Krista to study abroad, initially in Vienna and then in Paris. His life served me as motivation for my creative manoeuvres.”
The ruling regimes too often treat culture contemptuously
He says that his paintings are today sold literally as archaeological works, with buyers requesting works from 20 years ago that are no longer included in the offer.
“I offer them new ones, which they are never interested in, and it’s been like that for 35 years already.”
Responding to the question of whether there’s any painting that he would really love to buy, he answers: “Maybe some of my own pictures. I don’t know if I’d be able to paint them again, so I’d like to have them as an echo of the era in which they were created.
I would like a Basquiat or Dobrović sketch, one of those pieces from his post-cubist period while he was still in Hungary.”
He is reluctant to talk about his own place in contemporary European art, but he’s able to describe surreal moments like when great world curator and collector Harald Szeemann (1933- 2005) came to his house, or when he met René Block (1942) in Belgrade.
“I gained experience dealing with authority figures as a child. I observed that those who were a greater authority tended to be simpler as people. That’s also how Harald Szeemann rang my doorbell at 13 Mutapova Street, where I was then living, entered the flat and processed to chat with me for two and a half hours. He selected the works that are today at the Albertina. That’s the same Szeemann who’d previously worked on two consecutive Venice Biennales at the turn of the millennium… A few months later, I was sitting in Pevac [restaurant] with René Block, who made Beuys what it is today, discussing which work I would do for an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, which hosts the Documenta exhibition that he directs. Those are situations when you really think the sky’s the only limit! And then the wind changed, and in that very same year they assassinated Đinđić and reestablished neoconservatism and false traditionalism, like some thread from the mid-‘80s snapped accidentally and sent you back to where you were all along, where everything you do is more or less your own private matter.”
He nonetheless can’t do without what we have here, whatever it might be like. He considers everything he does as an author as being a kind of drama. And that drama can only be resolved at its source. He mentions Wassily Kandinsky who, like him, was born on 4th December, and who lived in Germany prior to World War I and was relatively well-off, and yet still chose to return to Russia. Why?
“That’s not patriotism in the vulgar sense; it’s a cry from within that tells you that you should go where you were shaped as a personality, where you want to contribute to the creation of a better society.”
Photo by Nebojša Babić
