By: Jasmina Trajkov, museum advisor
“Ilija Vukićević is one of those people who do not understand life as a mere sojourn on this planet.He is an artist who has a childlike curiosityand is interested in the visible and invisible world.He wants to understand the secret of eternal movement, to stop the moment of creation of the existing universe and to try to answer the question: what are we and what is happening around us. In the city where he lives, his fellow citizens know him as a person constantly turned to people, as a cultural pioneer, as a teacher of those who have embarked on the adventure of creation. For decades his studio has been a place where the curious, creators and those who love art for the sake of that love gather.” This is how, in just a few sentences, on the occasion of the last retrospective exhibition of Ilija Ika Vukićević, which opened at the end of September 1984 at the Regional Museum in Jagodina, former Svetozarevo, the famous artist and journalist from Jagodina Žikica Jovanović highlighted the essence of Ika’s artistic work and personality.
As this was also the last time Ilija Vukićević exhibited, the Jagodina audience had not had the opportunity to see his works for almost four decades, and his name had already fallen into oblivion. Therefore, the retrospective exhibition of Ilija Vukićević’s paintings, which the Regional Museum is organizing from April 25 to May 25, is an opportunity to remember him and point out the importance he had in the renewal of artistic life and culture in general in post-war Jagodina. The special significance of this exhibition is also that a large number of our fellow citizens who own Ika’s paintings responded to the invitation of our museum to lend them for the purposes of the exhibition. In this way, we came across data on more than a hundred works by Ika Vukićević that are in private collections, not only in our city, but also throughout the world. In 2022, ourmuseum received six of Ika’s paintings and his portrait by the famous Serbian naive artist Janko Brašić as a gift from Nastassia Vukićević Senal, the niece of Ilija Vukićević who lives in France, which greatly enriched the collection of theMuseum.
Ilija Vukićević brought original and new artistic expression to the Jagodina art scene, which was well received by the public and critics. He began painting as an amateur in the early 1950s, when he exhibited for the first time. He learned from Vojin Veličković and Ljubodrag Janković Jale. Ika was a prolific artist, and exhibited his works at collective and solo exhibitions throughout Serbia until 1985. The openings of his exhibitions were real ceremonies, at which prominent figures from the political, social, and cultural life of Serbia spoke, and Jagodina poets embellished the events with their recitation of verses.
He formed a specific visual language close to surrealism. His main themes were micro and macrocosm. In his paintings, he presented a “small world” invisible to the human eye. These are Ika’s “creatures”, amorphous forms that float in a magical space. The other world that Ika painted wasthe distant one and also inaccessible to the human eye. These are landscapes from the Moon and faraway planets.
With his own funds, he built a studio in the yard of his family home. This studio was, in the words of his contemporaries, “the first, last and only art salon of Jagodina” and “the meeting place of the spirit of this region”. Many future artists emerged from this studio, and for Ika it was a place where he created his imaginary worlds and landscapes, especially at night to the sounds of classical music.
He was tireless when it came to working on the spread and cultivation of culture. He prepared programs for Radio Svetozarevo on topics from the city’s past, organized the first art colony in Jagodina, which unfortunately did not come to life because its work was based on the enthusiasm of the participating artists and the modest help of individual city enterprises. He also played a major role in re-establishing the work of our museum after the retirement of the first director Dušan Vukićević in 1961. On the initiative of Ika Vukićević, the Museum was revived in 1963 and formed as a complex-type institution headed by the new director Savo Vetnić.
We waited for Ika’s exhibition for a very long time. Regardless of the number of justified and unjustified reasons for its postponement, we never lost enthusiasm or gave up on its realization for a single moment. Starting in 2015, the Museum launched a series of retrospective exhibitions of the most significant Jagodina artists. The exhibition of Ilija Vukićević was planned for September 30, 2020, Museum Day, but its opening was prevented by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the unfavorable epidemiological situation, the Museum did not organize a single exhibition until September 2021. After this period, exhibition activity and many of the museum’s projects came to a standstill. Printing more extensive catalogs was not possible due to lack of finances. This is the main reason why the exhibition of Ilija Vukićević was postponed for five years. The funding problem might still not have been resolved if it weren’t for Ika’s admirers and friends who helped print this catalog, but who wish to remain anonymous.
Just as Ika fought for the life of culture in Jagodina, we are following in his footsteps despite all the problems we encounter in our work. We invite you to attend the opening of the exhibition by Ilija Vukićević on April 25, at 7 pm and thereby show together that museums are not “waist of money” and that investing in cultureand art is what strengthens the foundations of every society and ensures the future of the nation and state.
