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4/6/2009

Padiglione della Repubblica di Montenegro

Palazzo Zorzi, Venezia

Montenegro Pavilion at the 53rd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition organised by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Media of Montenegro with the support of UNESCO and installed by the National Museum of Montenegro

The Zorzi Elegies
Artist: Dado
Curator: Pavle Pejovic National Museum of Montenegro
Commissioner: Michael Peppiatt art critic, author and historian

The UNESCO Office in Venice will host at Palazzo Zorzi from 5 June through 2 November 2009 the Pavilion of Montenegro in the frame the 53rd. International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia : ZORZI ELEGIES. The exhibition is organised by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Media of Montenegro (Official Announcement) with the support of UNESCO. The curator is the National Museum of Montenegro in Cetinje.

The Exhibition ZORZI ELEGIES represents the first independent participation of Montenegro at the 53rd Venice Bienniale of Art. Montenegro is the country where Dado the artist of the Exhibition was born, and where he comes from.

For half a century, the well-known Montenegrin-born artist Dado (Miodrag Djuric b. Cetinje, 1933) has been creating a world of delicate horror and intricate fantasy in every medium from painting and fresco to drawing, engraving and book illustration. In 1989, the mill at Hérouval in Normandy, France that has long been Dado’s adoptive home burnt down. Among the many things consumed by the fire was a series of sculptures that Dado had begun to work on. These sculptures marked both a new departure for the artist and a summum of what he had created before. Where he had relied until then on his prodigious graphic ability and unerring eye for acidic colour to create a world of sinuously suggestive horror (unequalled since Bosch), here he was confronted by new demands on his extraordinary plastic inventiveness.

Burrowing into the smoking ruins of his studio, Dado dragged out and salvaged the elements destined to constitute a new race of sculptures. He has since baptized them the ‘Zorzi Elegies’ in honour of the splendid Renaissance palazzo where his works are exhibited during the Venice Biennale. Cast in bronze, the sculptures juxtapose the most unlikely and arresting elements: a saint’s head with a tree trunk and a half-melted saucepan, for instance, or a homunculus in a bucket welded to an ancient washing machine drenched in bright colour. Around the elegant Palazzo Zorzi courtyard, where a score of these eloquent artefacts subtly blending the sacred and the profane are displayed, stand several vast banners based on photographs recording the fire on which the artist has superimposed images that came to him as, after a misdiagnosed illness, he hung between life and death recently in a six-day coma. Each of the sculptures exhibited has been dedicated to a number of people, poets, painters and friends all now dead, that have been of central importance to Dado and his career as an artist. Grouped together with a number of Dado’s paintings on wood lent by the National Museum of Montenegro, the ensemble makes an unusually powerful impact, setting up a direct and eloquent dialogue with the dead that brings sharply into question our own identities and bearings in existence.

The commissioner for the exhibition is Michael Peppiatt, formerly editor of ‘Art International’ and best known for his books and exhibitions on Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and other major 20th-century artists. The exhibition catalogue contains an introductory essay by Michael Peppiatt, an essay by the prominent English art historian Jill Lloyd placing Dado in an international and historical context, and a detailed biography by the artist’s daughter Yanitza Djuric.

Further details concerning Dado’s work and career can be found on the artist’s website http://www.Dado.fr

For further details, contact UNESCO Venice Office Reception at tel. : +39 041 260.15.11 and at: veniceoffice@unesco.org

Image: Atelier Dado, mixed media, 245 x 151 x 50 cm, National Museum of Montenegro ©cetinje.cg.yu, Dado installation National Museum of Montenegro Cetinje

Vernissage and Press Conference: 5 June 2009, 2.00 pm

Ufficio UNESCO Palazzo Zorzi
Castello 4930 Venezia
Hours: 10 am. - 5 pm. sturday and sunday 11am. - 5 pm.

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