Oil, collage and serigraphy on board, 56 x 86 cm

Mersad Berber was a master of drawing. He was born in Bosanski Petrovac (BiH) in 1940. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and completed postgraduate studies in graphics in Ljubljana, then taught at the Art Academy in Sarajevo. He had a notable international career and passed away in Zagreb in 2012. In his paintings, he showed a great fascination with the tradition of Islamic art and Western painting (Velasquez, Géricault, or Vlaho Bukovac), and often combined these two expressive codes. Due to numerous quotations, appropriations, and emphasized symbolism and narrativity, his paintings are often categorized as examples of postmodernism in painting. In this self-portrait, Berber depicts fragments of the world that occupied him alongside his own figure, imprinting some of them serigraphically. This technique, combined with oil paint, gives these elements a sense of transparency and elusiveness, also suggesting that these are mental images. We see (on the left side) human figures, an anatomical depiction of a human head and (on the right side) a figure we could (probably) identify as Nikola Tesla. The figure of the artist stands at the center of these seemingly unrelated details. What connects the pieces of reality that Berber collages is his figure as the center of this mental event. In other words: here he wants to depict his consciousness. The painter, thus, aims to guide the viewer into his streams of thought, to bring him closer to the associations and processes of his building of visual narratives, but also to stimulate some new associations and thought processes in the viewer itself. FG

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