BRACO DIMITRIJEVIC
LOUVRE IS MY STUDIO, STREET IS MY MUSEUM

Curators: Magda Carneci, Mihai Oroveanu, Oana Tanase
30  April – 01 June 2008
opening – wednesday, 30.04.2008/ 18h00
MNAC, Calea 13 Septembrie, Bucuresti
http://www.mnac.ro/

Braco Dimitrijevic’s retrospective at the Bucharest’s MNAC is a comprehensive survey of this seminal conceptual artist’s oeuvre, ranging from his interventions on the street in the late sixties to the most recent video works. The artist acquired an international reputation in the seventies with his series of Casual Passer-by, exhibiting on the prominent facades and billboards of European and American cities large photographic portraits of unknown people. The works from the same cycle were exhibited in Documenta 5 (1972), Venice Biennale (1976) and numerous others solo and group exhibitions.

The first part of the exhibition’s motto “Louvre is my studio” refers to the cycle of the works initiated in the mid seventies. Triptychos Post Historicus are three-dimensional still life pieces consisting of original master paintings, usually borrowed from museum collection, everyday objects and natural elements – fruits or vegetables. Dimitrijevic made his very first Triptychos Post Historicus in 1976 at the Berlin Nationalgalerie with paintings of Kandinsky, Picasso, Manet and Mondrian. In the last three decades the artist realized over 500 Triptychos Post Historicus installations and photographic works in the numerous museums. With Triptychos Post Historicus the artist revisits history of humanity and history of art creatively incorporating masterworks such as Leonardo’s Madona, Saint Ann and Jesus, Malevich’s Red Square, Rubens’ Rape of Europe, David’s Death of Marat or Turner’s  St. Benedict, Looking Toward Fusina into new visual and conceptual structures.
 
“Our world is not made of master pieces, nor of bicycles or apples but of all these things together”, says the artist.

The MNAC exhibition includes a number of pieces from the series Triptychos Post Historicus realized with the master works from the most prestigious museum collections including. Tate Gallery London, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Ludwig Museum Cologne, Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, The Louvre, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Musee d’Orsay Paris, amongst the others. 

Braco Dimitrijevic pioneered two important artistic tendencies of today: his poetically subversive intrusion in the urban landscape and  his shifting of meaning of forms such as large portraits, monuments, memorial plaques had enormous impact on current neo conceptual practices of interventions in public space. On the other hand, Triptychos Post Historicus series preceded for decades today’s curatorial vogue of inviting contemporary artists to intervene in museum collections.

In her catalogue essay Magda Cârneci wrote:
“From the beginning of his career initiated at the end of the 1960s within the conceptualist movement, Braco Dimitrijevic’s works have constantly opposed all kinds of stereotypes in thinking and behavior related to such “sacred” notions as power and fame, one-way progress and linear history, genius and authorship. But what makes him special among other radical artists is that his impulse for relativism and desacralization, his critical attitude against authority and dogma, have never lacked a sense of elegance and harmony, an empathic concern for the idea of the “other”, be it an unknown person, an animal, a bird, or a foreign culture. Braco Dimitrijevic is an artist who has chosen to employ the tools of art history in order to set art, artists, and the public free from too much history, and he does this with the striking strong weapons of good sense, “good manners”, and normality”.