Braco Dimitrijević

Braco Dimitrijević was born in Sarajevo in 1948. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb between 1968 and 1971, he graduated from Saint Martin’s School of Art in London in 1973.
In 1963, he created his first intervention in public space, Flag of the World, in which he replaced a national flag with a cloth used for cleaning paintbrushes. From the late 1960s onwards, he produced a series of works that set accidental processes in motion and asked strangers to sign them as works of art (Accidental Drawing, 1968; Painting by Krešimir Klinka, 1969). This approach, aimed at problematising the notion of authorship, also underpins the series devoted to “Casual Passers-by”, first presented in Zagreb in 1971 and, that same year, at the 6th Paris Biennale. The series involved placing large-scale photographic portraits of unknown people in urban spaces, presenting them as though they were important political figures or media celebrities. During the 1970s, he participated in documenta, Kassel (1972, 1976), and the Venice Biennale (1976), while his first retrospective was held at the Muzej suvremene umjetnosti in Zagreb (1973). During this period, he also began travelling to Italy, first invited to Naples by Lucio Amelio for a solo exhibition (1971), and subsequently to Turin by Gian Enzo Sperone, with whom he continued to work.
In 1976, he published Tractatus Post Historicus, in which he challenged the linear and evolutionary nature of art-historical processes, and presented Tryptychos Post Historicus at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, proposing an juxtaposition of pieces from the museum collection, anonymous everyday objects, and organic elements such as fruit and vegetables. The project was subsequently re-presented and further developed in numerous museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Russian State Museum, and the Louvre in Paris.
In 1981, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Waddington Gallery in London, he juxtaposed the collection devoted to the masters of modern art with two live peacocks. His work with animals continued during the 1980s with installations presented at the Sarajevo Zoo (1983), culminating in a major solo exhibition organised at the Paris Zoo (1998).