Nebojša Dimovski
MOTHERS
18. 11.- 02. 12. 2023.
A Mother Courage
Prof. Andrea Volo
In the orderly bedlam of Room 317 of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome my painting classes were taking place – in early 2000. And it is a recurring dream of mine to find myself lecturing among the easels of so many young artists and talking with them about cinema, theater, painting, psychoanalysis, music and a possible “sun of the future.” Then the dream breaks and we move on to memories.
Among the most vivid and sympathetic memories, because of the immediacy of the pictorial quality, I have very well in mind the works of Nebojša Dimovski from that time. His works had that typical technical solidity of traditionally trained students from Eastern European art schools. In the Eastern Academies the seductions of the “motto di spirito” of Duchamp’s epigones had not (yet) contributed to the trivialization of painting technique, confining it to a secondary and residual aspect of art. Put more simply, Nebojša was already-at the time of his attendance at the Accademia di Roma-a technically solid and reliable painter, with a plastically and coloristically beautiful figurative line.
Now he presents himself with a series of extremely consistent paintings dedicated to all “Mothers,” taking as his immediate subject the figure of his own Mother.
These are recent works, executed between a presence in Mostar and frequent trips to Spain, and are presented with images that are sometimes quick and simplified and by the brilliant gesture of an unthinking cursive writing. Other paintings have a more complex structure involving the coexistence of one or more paintings within the painting, like open windows onto past and recent memories and tragedies in the history of Mostar and the former Yugoslavia.
The picture within the picture is one of the places of painting that serves to overlook a kind of “Mise en abyme.” A particular kind of “story within a story,” in which the story told-in the painting within the painting-can be used to summarize or encapsulate some aspect of the story that frames it.
In one of the paintings within another painting, Stari most is depicted. The bridge in Mostar destroyed in 1993 during the conflict that ended the coexistence of different ethnic groups and cultures. Certainly a sign of the collective and individual tears that marked those regions.
But around the tragedies caused by conflict. However, the skein of affections and memories and gestures of daily life unravels. And the Mother (for all Mothers) reads, works, moves within the walls of her home. Rooms with worn and surreal colors that are so reminiscent of the sets of the films of Aki Kaurismäki, a director whom Nebojša Dimovski loves very much.
Finally: a remark on the swaggering, abbreviated stroke of the language of Nebojša’s painting. It is a continuous flow of movement of the painter’s “intelligent hand,” which identifies and digs into the pictorial material the wrinkles of maternal wisdom left by the harshest experiences. A ballad, a drama in music, between Brecht and Kurt Weil, for a new, yet another “Mutter Courage” of our days. Days that again and again are marked by the banality of evil. And by wars that dig more furrows in the faces of Mothers.
Nebojša Dimovski was born in Mostar in 1988. He finished art high school in Sarajevo, after which he went to Italy and entered the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, at La Sapienza University. He finishes painting in the class of professors Andrea Vol and Constantin Blandino. During his studies, one of his works was selected for the final of the prestigious Premio Nazionale delle Arti in Naples. After completing his studies, he went to the Netherlands, where he spent time in research work and in the studio of the American sculptor Barbara Greenberg. After Holland, he goes to Madrid, where he has notable exhibitions, such as the final of the 83rd Autumn Salon, Casa de Vacas, the Spring Salon, Valdepenas, a solo exhibition at the Association of Artists and Sculptors of Spain and many group exhibitions in Spain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States. He won the First Prize at the Valencia Kuna international competition.