Braco Dimitrijevic
Biography
(Bosnian, b. 1948)
Setting out on an artistic path with the first solo show at the age of ten,
Braco Dimitrijevic flourished to become of the most important conceptual artists in the 20th century. Through his fifty years of practice Dimitrijevic explored themes related to how history is composed - and our perception of it through post-history. The artist’s breakthrough series ’Casual Passer-by’ elevated unknown people from the streets of Zagreb, Paris and London to a status of presumed celebrity, by displaying their portraits on huge billboards, in an aim to prove that we all have a part to play in history.
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.
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,
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.