Serbian painter, Ljubomir Popović, known as Ljuba, born on 14 October 1934 in Tuzla (Bosnia), died on 12 August 2016 in Belgrade.
Life
Born in Tuzla, Ljuba grew up in Valjevo, in Serbia. In Belgrade he attended the Academy of Applied Arts, then the Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Marko Čelebonović, Đorđe Andrejević Kun and Milo Milunović. Noticed by Leonid Šejka at the 1959 graduation exhibition, in 1960 he exhibited with the Mediala group.
In the autumn of 1963 he left Belgrade for good and moved to Paris. There he quickly found the support of gallerists and writers close to Surrealism, and Thessa Herold’s gallery championed his work. In 1971 René de Solier devoted a monograph to him, the first published in France on a Serbian painter. André Pieyre de Mandiargues wrote about him from 1970, and Walerian Borowczyk filmed his work in the short film L’amour monstre de tous les temps (1978).
The work
Trained in the academic nude, Ljuba moved away from it very early on:
“I was always a little unhappy working from life, because I saw more in the model than was there.” (Ljuba)
His painting, often described as fantastic Surrealism, stages bodies, mostly female, in erotic or unexpected subjects. It draws on Renaissance and Baroque painting and carries a dark vein. Among his major canvases: Les pèlerins d’Emmaüs (1960-1962), L’apparition (1967-1968), La Tentation de saint Antoine (1972), the triptych Hommage à James George Frazer (1976-1978), Le Théâtre de la cruauté (1990).
Sarane Alexandrian, who devoted a study to him in 2003, wrote: “One can speak of a kind of modern mysticism in Ljuba, because he has a conception of the cosmos, of time and of death that he puts into his painting, and this conception is not scientific but intuitive.”
The gallery showed his canvas Trois points (1980, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm) in the exhibition “Visions” in November 2023.
Exhibitions and collections
- Retrospective “Ljuba Popović (1934-2016)”, Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, 4 September to 20 October 2019
- Serbian public collections: Moderna galerija, Valjevo; Museum of Contemporary Art and National Museum, Belgrade; National Museum, Kragujevac