Ljubomir Perčinlić
Ljubomir Perčinlić (born May 28, 1939 in Zenica ; † September 7, 1998 in Zagreb ) was a Bosnian painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo .
Life
He held his first solo exhibition in 1959, before he began studying at the Belgrade Academy, when he was twenty in his hometown of Zenica (in the gallery of the House of Culture in the city of Zenica). Between 1960 and 1966 he studied in Belgrade, where he graduated in the class of Professor Nedeljko Gvozdenović. In the same year he took part in the Generation 66 exhibition in the Cvijeta Zuzorić art pavilion in Belgrade. Also in Belgrade and in the same year, a solo exhibition followed in the gallery of the then respected, so-called Kolarčevog narodnog univerziteta . In 1966 he returned to Zenica. Perčinlić was employed as a professor of artistic education in the local high school.
Another important point of his progressive artistic thoughts was the establishment of the artist group Raum-Form ( Prostor-Oblik ), which also played a major role in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian art scene , which he established together with the painters Edin Numankadić, Tomislav Dugonjić and the graphic artist Enes Mundžić 1975 founded. On October 10, 1975, the group exhibited for the first time in Banja Luka. Immediately afterwards exhibitions in Zenica and Sarajevo followed.
In 1975 Perčinlić became a lecturer at the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts. In 1988 he was appointed full professor there. He stayed there until the official outbreak of civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1992 he moved with his family (with his wife and a son) to Zagreb in Croatia. In the following year he became a member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists . In 1994 it was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art ( Muzej suvremene umjetnosti ) in Zagreb. Numerous solo and group exhibitions followed both up until his death and afterwards (also in Bosnia, Slovenia and Kina).
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Because of the general historical developments in this area of Central Yugoslavia , the visual arts in Bosnia-Herzegovina began to develop late and so it was only late to experience the formal and theoretical debates that occurred in the visual arts of (Western) Europe, but also in the Yugoslav art tendencies of the 20th century (in Croatia , Slovenia or Serbia ) had already taken place. In this practical and theoretical further development of the concept of art, which also meant a general intellectual and cultural development, the role of Perčinlić within Bosnia was of outstanding importance. He was one of the first Bosnian-Herzegovinian artists to seriously grapple with overcoming the prevailing traditional, but also - until the late 1950s - partly ideologically adapted concept of art. Already in the first works there is an image conception that represents a clear contrast to the image conception of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian art scene at that time. Since the main form of artistic expression in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to its late development, was painting, the new ideas came from artists who dealt with this medium. With a new concept of art and a new artistic conception, the group Die Vier (Četvorica) from Banja Luka emerged around the same time or shortly before him (in the second half of the 1950s) , whose members were the painters Dušan Simić, Bekir Misirlić, Alojz Ćurić and Enver Štaljo were. In this context, the painter Kemal Širbegović, who also comes from the Banja Luka scene, should be mentioned.
From the beginning until his death Perčinlić's painting showed an extraordinarily pronounced reductionist orientation, not only in the formal sense, but also with regard to the color palette used, which was limited and often monochrome according to his simplistic pictorial logic. In his early work, the colors of his pictures are reduced to light nuances of mostly green, purple, gray and blue, which are underlaid with white and occasionally combined with brown. The picture is always two-dimensional and flat. This even in his first landscape paintings, in which he figuratively translated motifs from Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Croatian Pelješac peninsula into regular and irregular color surfaces and transferred them to the image plane in a row. Only a horizon fixed in the upper part of the picture surface - mostly the line of a mountain in the distance - suggests picture depth and thus the impression of a fictitious three-dimensionality. The depth of the picture is only shown in sparse doses in his interiors, which at the beginning of his career from 1959 to 1962 were often composed as still life-like subjects.
With the next phase the color decreased even more. The images from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s can sporadically only be deciphered for representational purposes on the basis of their titles. Experimenting with figurative forms of the Bosnian ambience leads more and more clearly to a geometry, and the image remains without any impression of depth. From now on, the image is reduced to its “true” two-dimensionality. But this reduction continues and the economical application of the selected colors, which has always been the case, leads - now in the 1980s - to monochrome, to tone-on-tone images, in which rectangles and squares depicted with blurred contours in one with Watercolors achieved a pale color that evokes the transcendent of a spiritual world. In the eighties he began to use a drawing technique he developed himself by scratching fine lines into the thin drawing paper with a scalpel, which he in turn combined with those drawn with a pencil and grouped them into basic geometric shapes. The color reduction of such a drawing, which results from the combination of tones determined by gray and the off-white paper surface, reaches the next level of artistic refinement. The mostly blurred or oddly drawn contours of these pictorial figures cause a special visual stimulus, which is to be regarded as a deliberate additional effect of the pictorial and, despite the compelling reduction, leads to the painter's own poetics. This poetics also reveals itself at the end of the eighties, when Perčinlić consistently uses more and more similar “unpainting”, but definitely artistic methods, namely when he cuts and glues watercolored paper and creates fine layers of relief by gluing. Very fine, monochrome picture collages are created. Sometimes he draws his thin, barely recognizable lines with a scalpel.
All of this leads to his last artistic phase, interrupted by his death, in which he reduces painting to a minimum: he consequently reduces it to its zero point, after which it can no longer exist for him. More and more is cut into the surface (the surface of the painting ground is removed), thin paper painted in a very light shade is glued to it, sometimes individual lines are drawn with a scalpel or occasionally the surface cut out in this way is left in its found color. The pictorial forms thus created within a pictorial surface are always composed of several irregular and therefore imperfect geometrical figures, which can only be described as a picture to a limited extent. These are actually objects made by the hand of a painter that are provided with a frame. His last works were actually no longer pictures, but delicately created pictorial objects. The reductionist continuity associated with high aesthetic standards, both in expression and in form, which in and of itself was never an end in itself, but rather represents a process derived from the nature and character of the artist's personality, also make Perčinlić's oeuvre artistically significant outside the country's borders.
Literature and Sources
- Meliha Husedžinović: Slikarstvo. (Painting): In: Umjetnost Bosne i Hercegovine. 1974-1984. (Art of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 1974–1984.), Sarajevo 1984
- Aleksandar Adamović: Teze o bosanskohercegovačkoj umjetnosti. (Theses on contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian art) In: Catalog, Jugoslovenska dokumenta `87. (Yugoslav Documenta `87), Sarajevo 1987
- Vlastimir Kusik. In: Galerija "Likovna jesen": Catalog. Ljubomir Perčinlić. Watercolors and drawings. Sombor, September 1987
- Marijan Susovski, Zvonko Maković. In: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti (Museum of Modern Art) (Ed.): Catalog. PERČINLIĆ. Slike, crteži 1959-1993. (PERČINLIĆ. Sketches, drawings 1959–1993.), Zagreb 1994
- Zvonko Maković. In: Galerie Galežnica (ed.): Catalog. Ljubomir PERČINLIĆ. Mala polja. (Ljubomir PERČINLIĆ. Small fields), Velika Gorica, April 28 - May 23, 1998
- Elio Krivdić: War.Art.Crisis. A cross-section through contemporary art in Bosnia-Herzegovina. innsbruck university press, Innsbruck 2010
- Irfan Hošić: Usamljeni genijalac. (The lonely genius) In: DANI, Sarajevo, from August 26, 2011
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Perčinlić, Ljubomir |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Bosnian painter and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Zenica |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 7, 1998 |
| Place of death | Zagreb |