Dušan Zivlak

He was educated in Nakovo and Kikinda and graduated from Faculty of Fine Arts of University of Arts in Belgrade. He is a painter and sculptor. He has lived in Paris since 1950. He has been a member of La Maison des Artistes de Paris since 1983. His key activities are figurative painting (acrylic, oil, combined techniques) and drawing (graphite pencil, pastels, crayons, combined techniques). By making his painting come to life via a spirit of estranged meetings, unconnectable connections and genre sacrilege, Dušan Zivlak has not strived towards a new order, new hierarchy of values and goals that would only put new clothes on old normativism. From one painting to the next, Zivlak surrenders his artistic coordinates, grafting of his figures, items and legends, his “bricolage” of scenes, themes, styles and motifs to a spontaneous, almost wild montage of attraction and distraction, addition and bursts, in which the artistic scene in a way incorporates the viewer. In the present artistic moment, in the conditions of developed pluralism, an option that Dušan Zivlak stands for in his art has a full-fledged legitimacy. His paintings are a true conglomerate of contemporary artistic information, and it contains a significant dose of visual artistic energy that affects the perception of a viewer in a suggestive manner. That energy is built out of numerous individual pieces of data in a painting, all combined using a technique of collage, and is built out of impulses of everyday life broken through a prism of the artist, as well as the awareness of the civilization meaning of art and its sense. In 2011, Dušan Zivlak was invited to be a guest lecturer at Université des Beaux-Arts (Kede College of Capital Normal University) in Beijing, China. There, he took part in a conference and display titled The Art of Global Communication, and received an honorary academic title at Université des Beaux-Arts of Kede College of Capital Normal University, Beijing.