oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, signed with a monogram in the middle bottom, in red, "X"

Vladimir Veličković was born in Belgrade in 1935, where he completed his studies at the Faculty of Architecture. There, he exhibited with the post-surrealist group Mediala. He then went to Zagreb, where in 1962 he became an associate of the Master Workshop of Krsto Hegedušić. The existential and gloomy, krležian poetics often in Hegedušić's oeuvre, certainly stimulated Veličković's very similar aesthetic. He stayed with Hegedušić relatively briefly, until 1963, and since 1966 he has lived permanently in Paris, where he taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He profiled himself as one of the greatest painters of European post-war figuration. Expressive interpretations of anatomy in motion and a dark imaginary of his work, represent an unsparing image of the state of contemporary man, comparable to the one that Francis Bacon gave on canvases. He died in 2019, in Split. From the 1970s, in his painting, props suggesting corporal tortures and convulsions of anatomy, reduced to heaps of meat, are becoming more frequent. In this painting, hanged, deformed bodies, beheaded or with the head in the process of falling off, scream their message about the disintegration of the individual man - his physical being, as well as mental integrity - and consequently, the disintegration of the whole society. Red accents on a dark background, with pale strokes describing the body, enhance the discomfort and the sense of threat. The associations that portrayals of corporeal suffering in 20th century art can evoke are very broad - from war suffering to the mental torment of modern man. Veličković defined the human body with a precise drawing. He mastered its shape to show its immense helplessness and confront us with the realization of our own weakness and fragility in the face of this world. FG

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