Braco Dimitrijevic

Braco Dimitrijevic is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and had his first one-man exhibition at the age of 10. In 1963 he made his first conceptual work, The Flag of the World, in which he replaced a national flag with an alternative sign. It marked the beginning of his artistic interventions into urban landscapes.

Dimitrijevic gained an international reputation in the seventies with his Casual Passer-by Series, in which gigantic photo portraits of anonymous people were displayed on prominent facades and billboards in European and American cities. The artist also mimicked other ways of glorifying important persons by building monuments to passers-by and installing memorial plaques in honour of anonymous citizens such as the series This Could Be a Place of Historical Interest.

In the mid-seventies he started incorporating in his installations original paintings borrowed from museum collections. The Triptychos Post Historicus, shown in numerous museums around the world, unite in a harmonious synthesis high art, everyday objects, and fruit. The artist’s statement Louvre is my studio, street is my museum expresses both the dialectical and transgressive nature of his oeuvre. In the last thirty years, Dimitrijevic has realized over 500 Triptychos Post Historicus, with paintings ranging from Leonardo’s Madonna to Malevich’s Red Square, in numerous museum collections including the Tate Gallery, London, the Louvre, the Musee National d’Art Moderne Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, the Musee d’Orsay, and the Russian State Museum, St Petersburg, amongst many others. His solo shows have included venues such as Tate Gallery and ICA in London, Kunsthalle  Bern, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, MUMOK in Vienna, Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, Xin-Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art in Beijing and Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

He has participated in major group shows such as the Kassel Documenta 5. Documenta 6, Documenta 9, several times at the Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale, Sydney Biennale, as well as Santa Fe Biennale, Havana Biennale, Kwangju Biennale and was included in the seminal exhibition LesMagiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.