Gallery of the Regional Museum Jagodina
EXHIBITION DURATION: September 14 – October 8, 2021
Ljubodrag Janković – Jale was born in Pirot in 1932. His father Radomir was a factory worker in Jagodina, and mother Ružica was a housewife. He finished elementary school and four grades of the lower Grammar school with a graduation in Jagodina, his hometown.
From 1947 to 1951, he attended the High School of Applied Arts (graphics department) in the class of Professor Mihajlo S. Petrov. Then, in 1954, he graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts (painting department) in the class of Professor Vinko Grdan.
Until 1968, he dealt with various disciplines in the field of applied art, and as an illustrator he collaborated with several publishing houses. In 1962, he was elected an assistant at the Department of Applied Painting at the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade, and five years later he was elected assistant professor (on the subject of the Evening Nude).
He became a member of The Applied Artists and Designers Association of Serbia (ULUPUDS) in 1957, and from 1961 he was a member of The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS). In addition to a series of solo exhibitions, he participated in many collective exhibitions in the country and abroad.
He taught as a full professor (on the subject of Act) at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade until his retirement in 1997.
FROM THE OPENING
EXHIBITION CATALOG
In the gallery of the Regional Museum of Jagodina the drawings of the prominent Serbian artist Ljubodrag Janković Jale will be displayed during Septembar. As Jagodina is the homeland of this artist, he often exhibited in our city. In 1973 he received the prestigious award of the city “Svetozar Marković”, which was awarded to prominent creators in the field of culture and social sciences. Janković last exhibited in Jagodina in 2008, and that exhibition was held in our museum.
After more than a decade, we are once again able to see the works of this exceptional artist who is equally studious and successful in the field of drawing, painting, sculpture and graphics. The exhibition at the Regional Museum features 50 drawings made in various techniques (pencil, ink, chalk, charcoal). The drawings were created in the period from 1965 to 2009, so this exhibition is a kind of retrospective of his drawing opus.
Not only that this exhibition put on display all the virtuosity of his drawing skills, but it represents the development of his thoughts and the origins of his inspiration. Close to Leonid Šejka, Ljuba Popović, Živojin Pavlović and other supporters of Mediala, Jale at the beginning of his oeuvre creates ascetically thin, camp figures, which express the dark spirit of the lost generation of the fifties, without childhood, illusions and bread. In the seventies, he left this skeletal dark world and began to draw and paint bathers and figures on the beach. The female characters who becаme the main topic of his interest gain in weight and monumentality. The artist uses bold perspective cuts and deformations to represent forms. He created a special race that exists only in art, and whose roots go back to the traditional art of the Balkans – the work of prehistoric man and ancient civilization.
By encroaching on the Balkan and Mediterranean heritage, his art represents a synthesis of the modern and the mythical, the ancient and the imaginary, so that Jale’s opus can be re-introduced, its stratification analyzed, researched and always read in a new way.
This exhibition brings us back to pure art of which Jale is a supporter, introduces the drawing, a technique which is the base of every artistic creation, and takes us into Jale’s mithopoetical world with its inhabitants: monumental figures, descendants of prehistoric and anthiques statues but also similar to Picasso and Henry Moore works.
