Uroš Đurić

Uroš Đurić
photo: Bojan Simovski
Born	(1964-12-04) December 4, 1964 (age 52) Belgrade, Serbia
Nationality	Serbian
Education	University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy University of Arts in Belgrade
Known for	Painting
Notable work	Populist Project
Website	UrosDjuric.net

Uroš Đurić (Serbian Cyrillic: Урош Ђурић; born December 4, 1964) is a Serbian conceptual artist, actor and painter based in Belgrade. He studied art history at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy and painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. In 1980, he took part in Belgrade punk movement by joining Urbana Gerila as a drummer. Đurić became an active participant of the Belgrade art scene since 1989 by founding the Autonomist (anti)movement together with Stevan Markuš. In 1994 they published the “Autonomism Manifesto”. During the 1990s he often appears in feature films, works as graphic designer and as DJ at Academy night club, known as The Hole. Contributor to several documentaries and underground comics publishing. Founder of Remont gallery & art magazine. From 1992 to 2010 he collaborated with Belgrade Radio B92.

by Stevan Vuković

“The author and the work are only the starting points of an analysis whose horizon is a language: there cannot be a science of Dante, Shakespeare, or Racine but only a science of discourses.”

Roland Barthes

Uroš Đurić’s strong presence in the popular media as a public personality, and his very charismatic appearance, constitute the major obstacles in grasping the specificity of the discourses he develops in order to intervene in the field of contemporary art and culture. What usually happens when his works, especially the ones that feature images of himself, are interpreted without insight into the grammar of visual language and into the conceptual strategies he uses, can easily be designated as a “naturalistic mistake”. It consists of equating micro-histories of his personal biography, as the biography of an empirical person who is the author of certain artworks, with the narratives that make up the visual content of those works, and with the features of the represented characters. The fact that he gets engaged with popular culture both in the fields of subcultures and of cultural industries (as an actor, radio host, underground punk musician), and in the field of critical and experimental visual art (as an author who recycles samples and schematics of popular culture in his work, which is mostly figural) gets condensed into a view of his works as functioning as “the organic representations” of those mechanisms of cultural production and of those subcultures.