Virtual Gallery of the Regional Museum of Jagodina
Author of the exhibition: Jasmina Trajkov
Biography
Nikola Tatić was born in Jagodina in 1962. After finishing high school, he studied architecture in Belgrade, and after completing his studies he worked as an architect. He was attracted to art from a young age, so he created in different media all his life. He started taking photography as a high school student in 1979. He exhibited at five independent and about 150 joint exhibitions. In 1986, he started painting in oil on canvas, and in 1997 he became interested in digital art. At the end of the last decade of the 20th century, he also started making sculptures in wood. His father, who was also an architect, got him interested in art. According to Tatić himself, he was twelve years old when he first saw the works of the famous painters Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali. The works of these artists and the art and aesthetics of surrealism in general had a great influence on his creativity. Nikola Tatić died in Belgrade in 2019.
Nikola Tatić started photography at the age of seventeen. He was a member of the Photo Cinema Club “Vuk Karadžić” in Svetozarevo (today Jagodina) since the foundation of this association in 1980. He organized his first solo photo exhibition in mid-May 1980 in the gymnasium hall. He exhibited about fifty works in which he presented the architecture of the city seen from his point of view. With the absence of a human figure in the photographs, he emphasized the alienation of man in modern society. In recent years, he also received awards for his work. In 1981 at the event “Days of Yugoslav Photography”, which is held in Čačak and is considered one of the most important photo exhibitions, two of Tatić’s photos were included in the federal photo selection. He was the winner of the first prize for a slide at the exhibition of the Photo Cinema Club from Dubrovnik, as well as the first prize for the photograph entitled “The Hand”, exhibited at the Tenth Yugoslav Exhibition of Youth Photography held in Kumanovo in 1984. In Belgrade, where he studied architecture, he became a member of the Photo Cinema Club “Steve Naumov” from Belgrade.
In the Art Photography Collection of the Regional Museum of Jagodina, there are nine photographs by Tatić that show the influence of Surrealism, which he met as a boy through the works of painters Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali. He was particularly impressed by De Chirico’s paintings “Love Song” and ” The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street “, as well as Dali’s “Premonitions of the Civil War” in which he saw, as he himself said, “mysterious, enigmatic worlds”. Inspired by Surrealism and these artists, he created ” enigmatic, mysterious, silent places” in his works, and he especially used De Chirico’s perspective, strong light and dark shadows in his photographs of city architecture. Tatić wrote the following words about his work: “Using many techniques, I am always painting the same idea, the same world, different from our own: silent, distant and lonely… The world that seems to wait for somebody. That somebody might be you? Who knows?”
In Nikola Tatić’s photographs, apart from the influence of the art of surrealism, one can also see his fascination with the great names of photography such as Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz.
