Vladimir Veličković graduated in 1960 from the Faculty of Architecture of the city of Belgrade, where he was born 25 years earlier, and spent two years in the studio of the Croatian painter and illuminator Krsto Hegedušić.
His first works were presented to the public in a solo exhibition in 1963. Soon, his fame spread across borders. So did he. He settles in the Paris region, in Arcueil, and receives the prize of the Biennale de Paris. From the beginning of the 1960s, the themes that will be dear to him throughout his life appear. There are zoomorphic and anthropomorphic bodies that seem to levitate in a sometimes fantastical, often anxiety-provoking atmosphere.
From 1972 onwards, he began a series of paintings and drawings that bear witness to the influence of the photographs that Eadweard Muybridge made at the end of the 19th century. His work corresponds to the psychoanalytical view of the sexuality/death duo. The spectre of the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia has long haunted his paintings. Sometimes reduced to a state of form, his motifs (crows, gallows, instruments of torture or shredded barbed wire) float in a chromatic range from red to black. The size of his works, often monumental, increases the viewer's sense of terror.
Vladimir Velickovic (1935-2019)
Sans titre, 14.8.1965
Encre de Chine sur papier
Estimation : 2 000 - 3 000 euros
In 1970, Vladimir's work Veličković was the subject of an ambitious exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris. Since the 1980s, a large number of museums and institutions in France and abroad have exhibited his works.
The ties that linked him to his native land have not unravelled with the weight of the years. He represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale in 1972 and, more recently, in 2009, he created the "Vladimir Velickovic Fund for Drawing" which rewards young Serbian artists. Died in 2019, the artist, elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in 2006, was preparing an exhibition at the Hélène & Édouard Leclerc Fund in Landerneau.