Vojislav Jakic
Vojislav Jakic (born 1932 in Macedonia and died 2003 in Serbia) was a Serbian artist known for producing large, minutely detailed tapestries depicting nightmarish visions of death, insects, and human insides.[1] Though Jakic did receive some limited training in his youth, the primarily naive, intuitive, bizarre, pathological, and visionary nature of his style has led to him being classified as an outsider artist, and to his body of work falling under the umbrella of L'Art Brut.
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Life
Vojislav Jakic was born to a severe, religiously devout Serbian Orthodox family in Macedonia in 1932, when it was still under the republic of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. The family moved to Serbia when Jakic was three years old.[2]
Jakic lived in severe poverty during his early career, executing portraits of the dead for local grieving families for meagre commissions, working from passport photos.[2] He began his creative work in earnest in 1954, carving wooden sculptures of cupboards filled with bones and skulls, progressing towards large scale painting that he embarked in 1960.
He married briefly in 1962, but the marriage dissolved and he returned to live with his mother.
Work
Jakic is known for his later phase of paintings—the abstract works that he began to execute after the dissolution of his marriage around 1969 or 1970.[2][3] These works are more abstract, disturbing and unusual then those which survive from the first phase of his career. "[He] drew assiduously on large formats from 1970 onwards. Certain works were executed on scrolls more than 50 metres long. His compositions with ballpoint pens, gouache and both normal and wax crayons teem with insects, embryonic figures and human beings."[3]
His subjects are predominantly dark visions of death, carrion, and exposed viscera. The illustrations that inhabit his paintings intertwine and overlap, creating complex and frightening configurations. One of his paintings carries the explanation: "This is neither a drawing nor a painting, but a sedimentary deposit of suffering."[1]
References
Bibliography
- Vojislav Jakic. Exhibition catalogue of the Collection de l’Art Brut. Lausanne : Collection de l’Art Brut, 1979.
- Publications de la Collection de l’Art Brut, fascicule 10. Text by Aleksa Celebonovic. Lausanne, 1977.
- The End is Near!: Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia. American Visionary Art Museum,1998
