Gallery RIMA

This year, at the 41st edition of the international art fair ART BRUSSELS Gallery RIMA represents art by abstract painter Đorđe IVAČKOVIĆ (1930-2012).

Gallery participates in the new fair section ’68 FORWARD where 14 selected European galleries represent artworks created from the year of Art Brussels’ inception onwards through the next decades of the XXth century. In the main exhibitor space (Hall 5), at the booth 5B-17, Gallery RIMA presents Ivačković’s abstract paintings, created between early 1970s and late 1990s.

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Đorđe Ivačković (Djordje, Djoka, Ivackovic) was a Serbian origin and Paris based abstract painter whose art development and recognitions belong to the international art scene between 1960s and 1990s.

During the 1950s, at the time of his studying architecture and practicing jazz music in Belgrade, Ivačković began to paint after seeing exhibitions of contemporary American and French painting. He approached abstract art from a stance of a musician and entered the realm of pure abstraction from the very beginning of his art journey. Although he started painting while living in Belgrade, he publicly displayed his work only after permanently settling in Paris in 1962. Ivačković earned his first international recognition participating at the Paris Biennial in 1965 (selection of 8 painters chosen by young French art critics).

In the period of his full creative maturity – between the 1960s and 1990s – Ivačković held solo exhibitions in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Brussels, Belgrade, participated in prominent group shows and Salons, and was represented at art fairs such as FIAC, Art Basel, Art Stockholm etc. His works were included in exhibitions of contemporary Yugoslav art organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art from Belgrade and shown throughout Europe and the world. Today his works can be found in Centre Pompidou in Paris, Neue Galerie in Graz, Museum of Contemporary Art and National Museum in Belgrade, as well as in private foundations and collections.

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Ivačković’s authentic art poetics is based on the symbiosis of two opposite approaches to abstract painting. The expressive, impulsive and improvisational element had its base in the postwar French and American abstract painting, experienced through the creative mind of a jazz musician. The second one belongs to the analytical approach to painting, contemporary art practices of the time, dealing only with picture’s basic elements and structural features such as dimensions, format, surface, line and color. With a restless mind of a jazz musician and a rational approach of an architect Ivačković created a unique synthesis of expressive and analytical abstraction. From the 1960s when his art was interpreted through analogies with jazz music, leading to the period of his “conceptual paintings” between mid-1970s and early 1980s, up to the phase of revival of color and gesture in his “energetic structures” during the 1980s and 1990s – Ivačković remained a pure abstract painter believing “that the language of abstract art, in the conditions of exceptional commitment and sensibility within the domain of visual communication, is the only way to the absolute”.