Art Brut Serbia. A Retrospective.
We all know that – yes, we – the children from the Prvomajska street, in which rules are not respected but people always are, where you can find everything from a needle to a locomotive, where you can find both the straight and the weird ones, the 360° range, thieves and the fair ones, everybody understands that everything had a meaning and that we gained our reputation in art circles as the representatives of a strong cultural scene not by accident but as a consequence of a serious continuity of our work. This is revealed in our numerous exhibitions and acknowledgements, both in our country and abroad. The essence of our work is to help a person and create things that will last forever. It wasn’t easy, but this is neither the time nor place to complain, we got together again to glance at the future, to work and think of nothing else, to have a good time, to relax and enjoy the moment, for lines to be alive, not afraid of the world around them but to rush, to want, to desire.
With modesty, we can claim that we are on the top not only because of our own doings, many generations did this before us, doing the same task with the same amount of passion. We were aided by the multi-decade experience of 20th century painters, by rising naïve artists, and by the understanding of their work. Nowadays, gallery owners are fighting over organizing our exhibitions, statesmen over giving us rewards, jet set over hosting us on parties, royal families want our paintings in their villas, big companies want us in their waiting lines, politicians call up on us, and we still know how to play like children, without much thought we know how to walk into the new and unknown and to enjoy it. It’s no longer ‘I am a villager, a worker, a convict, and I make paintings for the folk’, but we connect the postmodern and modern and popular culture and people’s demands for new artistic tendencies.
A domestic approach to the audience is our main advantage. Our man, busy with work and his battle for personal existence, maybe cannot always be right and remain interested in some higher goals. But exactly because of this, we reveal this small seed of need in every man, which draws him towards creativity and creation, so he doesn’t sit still and wait for instructions but takes the initiative and creates his own world. With this being so, we join the world trends and deliver to the world that which is extracted from the masses, which by itself is difficult to perceive.
Mileta Mijatović