Dado
Danse Macabre
21.4. – 24.6.2012

During the preparation of the retrospective of the Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan, the idea of meaningfully supplementing the exhibition arose. With the Montenegrin painter and draughtsman Dado (1933–2010), who was also a friend of Yüksel Arslan, and the Italian artist Carol Rama, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf presents two remarkable artist personalities, both still little known in Germany, who with great consistency largely developed their work outside the confines of the art world. The result is three separate exhibitions that can nevertheless be seen in an overriding context: despite the idiosyncratic nature of these three oeuvres and their very different artistic vocabularies, they overlap in terms of themes and pictorial worlds – the obsessive and unfathomable, motifs of sexuality, dreaming, violence and dismemberment, fetish and fragment, the treatment of collective and personal memory. Each in their own way, all three carried on the legacy of Surrealism.

Dado (Miodrag Djuric) came from Montenegro to Paris in 1956, where he, with his early fantastic drawings, was discovered and mentored by Jean Dubuffet and the art dealer Daniel Cordier, whose gallery was also the site of his first solo exhibition in 1958. Dado’s often nightmarish pictures were rooted equally in surrealistic worlds as well as in wartime experiences. Despite their brutality and existential horror, they had an inherent melancholy that was simultaneously an expression of uncompromising humanity. His pictures depicting the bustle of human misery were inhabited by numerous boisterous and grotesque monsters and peculiar creatures. The people were degenerated, swollen and misshapen, bloated and hacked to pieces. At a time dominated by Informel and abstraction, Dado’s paintings and drawings from the 1960s became an important model for such exponents of a new figuration in art as Eugen Schönebeck and Georg Baselitz. As the first institution in Germany, the Kunsthalle is presenting a selection of his early works, thus drawing attention to an artist whose work is still unknown to a wider audience despite the recognition he achieved as Montenegro’s representative at the 2009 Venice Biennial.

Please find here the catalogue of the exhibition.