In the spiritual and institutional reality of a culture, rarely does any value have such bearing as continuity - not as a simple form of survival, but as the ability to constantly rediscover and confirm one's own meaning through the layered changes of the epoch. In this light, the eightieth traditional exhibition of the Association of Fine Artists of Montenegro (ULUCG) does not represent a historical-thematic landmark, but rather a confirmation of the permanent need to preserve visual expression as a space of critical awareness, cultural responsibility and intellectual complexity.
ULUCG has, during its eight decades of existence, shaped the structure of the Montenegrin art scene. Its activities have never been neutral: they have simultaneously reflected aesthetic changes and offered an institutional framework for the autonomous development of contemporary artistic language. The annual traditional exhibition, as the longest-running art event in the country, has preserved the role of a space not only for presentation, but also for thoughtful confrontation with the question of what art is - and what it can be.
The contemporary Montenegrin art scene, viewed in the context of this year's exhibition, articulates specific internal tensions between continuity and resistance, between the locally rooted and the globally questioning. It is not a unity of expression that prevails, but a plurality of positions that do not seek consensus, but the possibility of coexistence. In this sense, the stratified thought matrix does not appear as a final summary of an epoch, but as an epistemological horizon - a place from which one does not add up, but analytically stratifies what art in Montenegro is today: diverse, multi-layered, fragmentary, but intellectually vital.
The three works awarded the prestigious “Milunović, Stijović, Lubarda” award confirm precisely this intellectual dimension of contemporary creativity. Sculpture Jelene Pavićević Marković entitled “Excavation” acts as a tactile archaeology of feeling. Her wall form, made of clay and textile, does not evoke the past as a narrative, but as the presence of matter that carries memory. Here, clay is more than a material - it is a substance in which time leaves no trace. The wall is not an obstacle, but a layer: a layer that does not conceal, but absorbs. In this sculpture, there is no fixed form - there is a space in which material and thought are deposited simultaneously. The artist does not formulate an object, but opens a relationship - a relationship to what is unspoken, but inscribed in the surface.
bike Jovan Vujović “Elusive Presence” is conceived as a complex visual matrix in which the semiotic structure of the work relies not on the representable, but on processes of suppression, overlapping and obscuration. What is nominally pictorial - the shadow of a human figure - functions as the negative of presence, while the visual-syntactic layer touches the border of meaning and becomes visual matter, a rhythmic system of signs devoid of discursive function.
The pictorial surface is not organized for the purpose of representation, but as a field of affective charge in which the content is not articulated, but rather the tension between the structured and the illegible. This establishes a specific ontology of the image: not as a bearer of meaning, but as a closed system whose intensity stems from the impossibility of a stable semantic foothold. Vujović does not thematize the figure, nor the record - but rather the complex regime of perceptual coding that problematizes the very possibility of reading. It is precisely the absence of interpretive permeability that generates the work's intellectual density, making it an example of a visual form in which the aesthetic functions within epistemological uncertainty.
Lidija Nikčević in the painting “Eastern Light” she constructs a geometric space of silence. The light in this work is not naturalistic - it is contemplative. It does not illuminate the form, but creates a rhythm in the absence of a figure. The architectural structure of the painting, without human presence, does not seem empty, but collected. It is not a landscape, it is a space of consciousness - a space in which light does not reveal, but reminds. Lidija Nikčević’s painting does not speak on behalf of the real, but on behalf of what remains when the gaze moves away: distance as an ethical stance. Her work reveals how painting can become a contemplative landscape without narrative, but with the depth of spatial contemplation.
Emin Nimanbeg, winner of the ULUCG Young Artists Award, shapes the narrative of a fragment through her untitled work. The collaged textile elements, placed on a black background, are not decorative, but tactile signs of a thought process. In the combination of fragments, fabrics and darkness, a visual language opens up that does not pretend to be complete. The work does not show the world - it shows its mere existence in layers of silence, absence, and discord. The artist does not assemble a form, but creates the possibility for rhythm, for a structure between the stable and the transient. In this unstable space, an investigative impulse is revealed, but also the poetic precision of an emerging sensibility.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro's redemption prize was awarded to Mila Djerkovic for the work “World of Olives”. In this work, the landscape is not a place - it is a state. The olive tree is not a depicted tree, but the bearer of a slow, calm rhythm of the world. The palette of earth and leaves, light cracks and soft shapes do not constitute a depiction of nature, but a meditation on its silence. Đerković does not paint an olive grove - she allows the landscape to happen through a carefully constructed atmosphere. There is no spectacle in that atmosphere, but there is one precious property of the painting: breathing. The painting breathes, as the earth breathes, as a memory that does not ask to be named breathes.
The award for the best solo exhibition in the past year was given to Nikola Marković for the exhibition “Toys without a Name”. His works do not document the past, but re-articulate it. In them, play is not nostalgic, but reflective; irony is not distance, but a means of revelation. Marković shapes a visual language that belongs neither to time nor to the medium, but to the inner rhythm of an artistic being who never stops asking questions. His work confirms that continuity is not a linear movement, but a circular reflection of what constantly redefines us.
In the intellectual-theoretical framework of this exhibition, the work of art does not function as a mere act of creation, but as a critical articulation of modernity through difference. There is no dominant poetics, nor an ideological hierarchy: there is plurality, and within it - resilience. This exhibition is not a cultural retrospective, but a mental projection: a space in which art is not consumed, but felt. Not as a message, but as a presence.
What can art mean today? Perhaps none of what is expected of it. Perhaps only what cannot be said otherwise. Art today belongs neither to the market nor to the institution - it belongs to those who have the will to see it, and the readiness to recognize their own insecurity in it. And where is the space of its true power? Not in the message, nor in the engagement, but in the moment when it forces us to pause, to displace ourselves, to recognize silence as a form of knowledge. In that silent, yet complete presence of the work of art, in its ability to strike us without explanation, a silent, yet persistent thought is heard. Susan Sontag - that art is not exhausted in meaning, but is realized in the experience that precedes it. Art then ceases to be an object - and becomes a presence. And that is, perhaps, the only form of duration worth preserving.
(The author is an art historian and theoretician)
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