In the summer of 1971, observant Parisians strolling down one of the grand avenues might have noticed a big billboard, hanging on a building façade, of what looked very much like an enlarged passport-photo of an average handsome man. A billboard absent of corporate logos or catchy taglines. Only the very inquisitive would notice a small plaque on street level stating “Casual Passer-by I met at 11:09 A.M Paris, 1971”. What appeared to be advertising, was not advertising, but an art installation by a young Bosnian artist.

Dimitrijevic’s first installation of ‘Casual Passer’s by’ had been in Zagreb in former Yugoslavia, the summer he graduated from the city’s Academy of Fine Art. As he made his way through Europe to attend Central St Martin School of Art in London, similar posters appeared in Paris and Berlin. The series ‘Casual Passer-by’ would define the artist’s breakthrough and establish him as one of the pioneers in conceptual art. In the decades that followed, equally anonymous people, like in Paris, appeared on billboards or posters in the public space; in the underground of London; on a scaffolding in his home-town, Sarajevo; on Les Champs-Elysées, Paris; in the subway of New York City; and many more.

Through his practice, Dimitrijevic has explored how history is recorded through our cultural filters, how it is often inaccurate in our recollection of it - and more importantly, how we all have a part to play in our common history. ‘Casual Passers-by’ was intended to challenge our perception that people displayed on billboards in public places somehow must be celebrities; and indeed, many people who saw his large façade-hanging posters were. The artist had no intentions to make celebrities of the accidental subjects of his work, or substantiating Warhol’s famous words in Stockholm in ’68 that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”. Dimitrijevic’s aim was to interact with history and altering post-history.

In the early seventies along his studies in London, Dimitrijevic took notice of the many houses in the English capital which had a round blue memorial plaques on the exterior. The prestigious plaques, commemorated the person who had been living there in the past, was awarded only by English Heritage; a charitable trust set up by the English government. Though many names were recognisable, such as Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare or Anna Freud, most of them would not ring a bell with the general public. Dimitrijevic started making his own plaques and placing them on houses to commemorate passer’s-bys; an idea that played well into his conceptual work.

A fellow artist, Alighiero Boetti, once told Dimitrijevic that he had bought an apartment for his daughter and when she was undecided between the last two places they had viewed, Boetti noticed a memorial plaque on the wall of the building and said “If this place was good enough for Roger and Suzanne Clauzade to live in, it should be good enough for you.”. The memorial plaque on the house was made by no other than Braco Dimitrijevic. Later on, the artist would create anonymous plaques simply with the text “This could be a place of historic interest”, placing them around randomly, questioning who comes to decide historic value - and suggesting that every place is of historic interest.

Conceptual art emerged in the mid-sixties and had a major influence in the art world in the ten years that followed. What defined the movement was that the idea, or concept, behind the work was more important than the visual outcome. This was different to most other movements where the appearance defined the work. All Dimitrijevic’s works are founded on an initial thought-process and built on strong concepts. In ‘Casual Passers-by’ it is the idea that we all can have a place in history - and thus impacting post-history. For the artist’s next body of work in the mid-seventies Dimitrijevic built it on a manifest and titled the series ‘Triptychos Post Historicus’; deriving from Greek and best translated as “three layers of post-historic era”.

For ‘Triptychos Post Historicus’, Dimitrijevic wanted to explore how a remarkable artefact, like a famous museum painting by Van Gogh or Picasso, could take part in a new historic narrative, apart from our expectations. In this conceptual series he would “paint” new artworks, each consisting of three parts: a museum object; an everyday artefact, like a candle or shovel; and an organic item such as an egg or fruit. The priority of the three parts listed, the first part having the highest historical value and to the third part having the least, the artist questions the hierarchy of recorded history.

In the work In the Galaxy of the Blue Horse, exhibited at Lenbachhaus Munich in 1991, the three parts are listed as:

Part I: ‘Blue Horse’ by Franz Marc 1917
Part II: Pitchfork supplied by Daniela Goldman
Part III: Melon.

A famous painting by the German expressionist Franz Marc is standing on the floor - and leaning across is a hay pitchfork, “supplied by Daniela Goldman”. In the foreground a melon is lying on a pedestal. While some things are random in the artist’s work, such as Ms Goldman most likely being a “passer’s-by”, Dimitrijevic is fundamentally an artist with an eye for composition and chosen colour palette. The leaning of the light-wood coloured pitchfork, and its position, is complementing the floor and walls - and similarly is the yellow hue of the melon and the yellow in Marc’s painting.

About the pieces in the series ‘Triptychos Post Historicus’ Dimitrijevic said, “I am just like an ordinary painter except that on my pallet there are bicycles, shovels, apples, Matisses, Rembrandts, lions and crocodiles”.

Portrait of a Young Man and Self Portrait with an Egg and Leonardo’s Madona were exhibited at Louvre in Paris in 1996. In Portrait of a Young Man, a painting by Botticelli cirka 1475, the painting is shown with a candle (lit by Dimitrijevic) and a beautiful red apple. The candle is perfectly positioned in front of the glaring look of the young man, and the apple stands perfectly on little table. The story told by Botticelli five hundred years earlier is resurrected into a new story.

Dimitrijevic’s self portrait from Louvre is one of the most recognised works from ‘Triptychos Post Historicus’. Here, the artist inserts himself into ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ by Leonardo da Vinci, by simply holding an egg. The Madonna’s sends her approving look as the egg descends into the gruesome trap below. For both pieces, the artist’s use of unrelated elements, rather than oil or acrylic paint, has created new works of art, much similar to painting.

The concept behind the priority of the three parts, making up each work in the series ‘Triptychos Post Historicus’, was to revive masterpieces, giving each of them a new and parallel existence outside its defined history told by a museum. At the same time, to challenge the viewers perception of who defines what is important in a post-historical perspective.

A suggestion to a gallerist in London, that he should have peacocks wandering around among the works of old masters, led to a new body of work in the early eighties. Again, Dimitrijevic’s idea was to present how our understanding of history is abstract and not a universal truth to be appreciated by non-human beings. Wild animals were confronted with artefacts and works of art, joining two cultural models; one model hinged on a common civilised history and another living in close connection with the nature. Fifteen years later, the artist created several installations with animals in Paris Zoo - an exhibition seen by one million people. The photograph, Last Witnesses of Another Logic (1983), showing Dimitrijevic playing the piano for a couple of elephants, is a calm and serene image depicting two widely different earthly logics.

Braco Dimitrijevic’s contribution to the conceptual art movement, over a span of fifty years, is significant. From his first exhibition at the age of ten, the artist’s work has been widely exhibited in Europe and United States since the early seventies, participating nine times at Documenta and the Venice Biennale combined. Museum retrospectives have been shown at Tate Modern, London, in 1985 - and at The State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2005. His most recent retrospective in 2017, simply titled ‘A Retrospective’, was in the city it all started, Zagreb in Croatia. Dimitrijevic’s works are included in more than eighty museum collections around the work including Tate Gallery and British Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Pompidou, Paris. In 1992 he was awarded ‘Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres’ in France. Dimitrijevic lives and works in Paris.

Representing two of the artist’s most important bodies of work, ‘Triptychos Post Historicus’ and ‘Witnesses of Another Logic’, four exclusive photographic editions were released in collaboration between the Braco Dimitrijevic and Eyestorm. The chromogenic prints, In the Galaxy of the Blue Horse, Portrait of a Young Man, Self Portrait with an Egg and Leonardo’s Madona and Last Witnesses of Another Logic (1983), were initially planned to be editions of 500 and 1,000 each, but only 50 were printed. The prints are signed by Dimitrijevic and numbered on front - and labelled on verso with full title of the work, including contributing parts.

To find more details about the four photographic editions by Braco Dimitrijevic, please visit his artist page here.