DUŠAN OTAŠEVIĆ

Otašević’s predominant method of work is remaking (“remakes Otašević”): of non-artistic materials, popular urban objects, “nonsenses of everyday life”, political icons, images belonging to local or international popular and everyday culture, media clichés, iconographic, genre, stylistic references from traditional and modern art, mainly those appropriated, remade and integrated by popular culture, and cultural stereotypes (“There are so many ideas around us that there is nothing new. I only use the existing ones and remake them.” Dušan Otašević, 1994). Their appropriation in Otašević’s work is never a simple and literal citation, either because the ‘original’ is released to circulate in metonymic and/or allegorical modelling. Changing and multiplying the meaning therefore becomes the truth in itself (closer to Baudrillard’s understanding of the simulacrum) because the ‘original’ is entirely made up after the model of the existing examples and planted in that world; something like an original without the original, camouflaged among the undeniable historical facts (closer to Deleuze’s understanding of the simulacrum). …
Jasmina Čubrilo

Dušan Otašević graduated from the Academy (Faculty) of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1966 in the class of Professor Ljubica Cuca Sokić. Since 1965 he has had almost fifty solo shows and participated in more than a hundred and fifty group exhibitions in Serbia and abroad presenting works done in different media (paintings, objects, installations, drawings, prints, collages). From the early seventies he was also engaged in theatre scenography. He has been a member of the Association of Serbian Artists (ULUS) since 1967. From 2000 to 2006 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2003 and became full member in 2009. In 2011 he was appointed Director of the SASA Gallery.