Ivan Grubanov

„The installation United Dead Nations, consists of a painting made with acrylic, hydrogen peroxide and glycerin on vintage flags and with a cement foundation. This floor painting, that I was making over the course of several months over a surface of 200 square meters, records on its surface the movement of my body and the flags of nations that had ceased to exist. These flags were used as brushes, soaked in a mixture of chemicals and paint in order to leave traces of their wrinkles and symbols on the cement plane.

By making the national flags bleed colour I brought the event of these nations’ deaths into close proximity, as if it had just taken place. The floor painting presents a site where something happened; it records the movements of a body, of the materials of history and politics, of the corpses of former nations. The soaked flags release their anima onto the cement surface together with the imprints of their presence.“

Ivan Grubanov  after graduating from the Belgrade Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting Department, he signed up for a two-year training course at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, spent a year at Delfina Studios in London and gained a scholarship from Casa de Velazquez, a French institute in Madrid. He received his Doctorate in arts from the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has had a number of solo exhibitions of paintings, drawings and installations at prominent institutions and events in the country and abroad, including the 56^th Venice Biennial, where he presented United Dead Nations at the Serbian Pavilion, Loock Galerie, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art MUSAC , Leon, Spain; Contemporary Art Centre Le Grand Cafe, Saint-Nazaire, France;  National Museum of Contemporary Art , Athens, Greece;  Art Gallery of Cultural Centre of Belgrade  and Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Serbia; Centre for Contemporary Art Stroom ,The Hague, Netherlands. Major group exhibitions where he participated are: – Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland;  Witte de With,  Rotterdam,  Netherlands; 10^th Istanbul  Biennial, Turkey; 1^st Thessaloniki  Biennale,, Greece; Stedelijk Museum, SMART Project Space and De Appel in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Drawing Center and Apex Art in New York, USA;  Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland; Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp, Belgium; Kiasma Museum , Helsinki, Finland; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, Norway;  Museu Colecção Berardo , Lisbon, Portugal;  Iaspis, Stockholm, Sweden; 3^rd Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest, Romania; 5^th Tirana Biennial,  Albania; Spaport Biennale, Banja Luka, Republika Srpska; Pančevo Biennale, Serbia; International Festival of Contemporary Art, Algiers; Modern Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia; City Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic  and Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada.