At the exhibition “25 Years of the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award,” opening on 4 September at 7 p.m. at the Gallery of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, a historic work created by the Gorgona Group based on Mangelos’s work Izhe, now held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, will be presented in Serbia for the first time. Apart from those in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Mangelos’s works are almost impossible to see on the Serbian art scene, making this an event of exceptional importance.
The exhibition will feature works by previous recipients of the award which, viewed together, map out an art scene that is constantly re-examining itself. Ivana Bašičević Antić and Miroslav Karić curate the exhibition.
The exhibition, marking the 25th anniversary of the award bearing Mangelos’s name, offers an opportunity to reflect on the importance of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos for the art scene of the entire region. The unusual nature of his career is illustrated by the fact that, for two decades, he worked publicly as an art historian, critic and curator, while privately creating art under a pseudonym taken from a village near his native Šid. Today, his work is almost impossible to see in Serbia.
It is precisely this other, concealed practice that has made him one of the most internationally acclaimed artists from this region. Mangelos pioneered conceptual artistic practice in the Yugoslav context—an artist who abandoned painting and introduced words, thought and theory as constitutive elements of the artwork, decades before this became commonplace in contemporary art. His handwritten manifestos, blacked-out tablets and globes inscribed with theoretical propositions are now held in the collections of the world’s most prominent museums. His work is also part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York—it can be said that he is the only artist of Serbian origin to have achieved this distinction.
However, the extent of his international reputation remains insufficiently discussed in Serbia. The main reason is geographical: Mangelos’s professional life unfolded in Zagreb, where he studied, completed his doctorate, worked as a curator and eventually died. Consequently, his name is often omitted from accounts of Serbia’s own art history, although he undoubtedly belongs to it—he was born near Šid and adopted his pseudonym from the nearby village of Mangelos.
Another fact connects him directly and professionally to the Serbian art scene: Bašičević authored the first scholarly monograph on Sava Šumanović. As an art historian, he thereby laid the foundations for the academic study of one of the key Serbian painters of the twentieth century, making his connection to this milieu a matter of professional significance rather than merely one of origin.
That connection, however, was not solely historiographical. Mangelos was one of the few people who supported young Belgrade artists at a time when doing so carried consequences. The prominent Belgrade artist Zoran Popović, as well as the artists associated with the Group of Six Artists in Zagreb, found in him the support they could not obtain elsewhere—in an environment where conceptual practices, the body, text and documentation were still regarded as failures rather than art. This support was crucial in breaking with rigid, entrenched notions of artistic form and in enabling these new practices to develop at all.
Mangelos’s artistic oeuvre cannot be separated from his institutional work. As a member and one of the founders of the Gorgona Group (1959–1966), he was involved in one of the most radical anti-art initiatives in Europe at the time. As a curator at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, he was among the initiators of New Tendencies, a series of international exhibitions and symposia that, between 1961 and 1973, placed the region on the map of the international neo-avant-garde for the first time in its history and anticipated the convergence of art, science, technology and computer-based thinking. He directed the Gallery of Primitive Art and later the Centre for Film, Photography and Television, promoting new media at a time when they were still considered marginal in the region.
Throughout his life, Mangelos insisted on one principle: art must constantly question itself. The award that has borne his name since 2002 continues precisely this spirit of restlessness by honouring young artists whose work refuses to settle for what is already established.
The exhibition will remain open until 30 September 2026!
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