"Beauty will save the world," he said. Fyodor Dostoevsky, but what kind of beauty? The harmonious and soothing one, or the one that emerges from the depths of human unconsciousness, from layers of repressed visions and collective archetypes? Painting Miodrag Dada Đurić belongs to this second understanding - it is not pleasant or tame, but disturbing and challenging, filled with the dynamics of forms that arise and disappear, transforming in a complex and autonomous visual system. This retrospective is not just a cross-section of his work, but a processual revelation of one of the most complex artists of the 20th century.
Dado Đurić, born in 1933 in Cetinje, early on showed a penchant for drawing and expression through a form that was never static. His artistic journey was marked by a trip to France and an encounter with the surrealist circle. Andréa Bretona, but his work goes beyond the classical framework of surrealism - it intertwines elements of expressionism, the iconography of medieval illuminations, phantasmagoric symbolism and the neurotic energy of the modern world.
Every painting, every drawing, and every object he created acts as a visual palimpsest, a space of constant change in which recognizable fragments of the human figure intertwine with surreal shapes, while compositions are formed through layers of dense and precise strokes.
His forms do not exist in a stable relationship, but are caught in a state of transformation - they pulsate, dissolve and reassemble, somewhere between the recognizable and the amorphous, between narrative and chaos. The human body, which appears as a central motif in his works, is never fixed - it disintegrates, multiplies, disappears in a network of lines that simultaneously shape and erase it.
In this sense, Đurić's visual poetics is close to Dostoevsky's existential philosophy, his exploration of the inner abysses of man, as well as the idea that the primordial human being is in an eternal state of turmoil, impermanence and conflict. "Hell is the inability to love," Dostoevsky states, and it is precisely this inability to understand, connect, and embrace the world in its entirety - vibrates in each painting.
The works gathered in this curatorial selection offer neither linear development nor narrative certainty. Instead, they provide insight into a visual mind that was in constant search, into a creative process that moved not towards finality, but towards eternal transformation.
Early drawings still carry narrative elements, while later works increasingly strive for the disintegration of form, overcoming the boundaries between figures and environment. Color is liberated, lines become autonomous, and the painting is transformed into a space in which energy flows from one form to another.
Despite its apparent abstractness, Đurić's iconography always remains in dialogue with human experience, with collective and individual subconscious images. His artistic landscapes are not landscapes of the external world, but landscapes of the unconscious, complex mental constructions that recall archetypal visions arising from dreams, myths and personal memories. This inner dynamic of the works makes them alive and elusive, impossible for unambiguous interpretation.
The presented oeuvre testifies to an artistic universe that was not tied to one place, one tradition or one aesthetic. Đurić was a nomad of art, one who moved through artistic spaces with a constant desire to find that which eludes definition, that which cannot be captured in words. His paintings are not just visual works - they are mental spaces, energy fields in which the past and the future intertwine in a disturbing present moment.
There is no definitive interpretation of Dado Đurić's painting, for it is always in a state of emergence and disappearance, in motion between the recognizable and the elusive. It is not a recorded reality, but a vision of a world that is constantly in transformation, a world that, like art itself, remains inexhaustible in its meaning. Beauty, perhaps, can indeed save the world - but only if we are prepared to see it in its full, untamed power, as Dado Đurić created it.
(The author is an art historian and theoretician)
Bonus video:
