On Thursday, October 31, the exhibition “Automatic Drawing – Marking the Centenary of Surrealism” by artists Selman Trtovac and Goran Stojčetović opened at the Oto Bihalji-Merin Salon in Belgrade (Nemanjina 3/10).
In the year that marks 100 years since the founding of Surrealism, this exhibition offers both a critical and investigative reflection on automatism as a mechanism for producing drawings—a process born from the workings of the unconscious. It also supports this mechanism, as art continually moves within the realm of the unconscious, which remains its primary source of unpredictability. Considering the legacy of Surrealism, we are now a century into the artistic trajectory shaped by Breton’s Manifesto and Duchamp’s introduction of the concept of the “beauty of indifference” as a 20th-century aesthetic. Without these two paradigms—and the influence of psychoanalytic theory—automatic drawing would be impossible to fully understand.
Today, as artificial intelligence increasingly permeates human activity, including the field of art, it also intersects with the concept of automatic drawing. This form of drawing occupies a unique position in art, potentially bridging post-conceptual and intuitive or outsider (art brut) practices. Automatic drawing can be seen as a justification for distancing art rooted in conscious intent from that emerging from the unconscious—or, conversely, it can be understood as eliminating that very distinction. This duality informs the argument for separating post-conceptual from art brut approaches to creating art.
Selman Trtovac represents a deliberate, conscious approach to automatic drawing, while Goran Stojčetović develops drawing as a means of expressing the deep unconscious—a practice that not only reflects the chaos of the subconscious but also serves as a form of therapy. This is precisely why he created the concept of the Deep Drawing Workshop, which he has led for several years with patients in the psychiatry department at the Military Medical Academy (VMA) in Belgrade.
Selman Trtovac was born in 1970 in Zadar, in the former Yugoslavia. From 1990 to 1993, he studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. In 1993, he joined Klaus Rinke’s sculpture class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he was named Master in 1997. He became a member of the International Artists’ Committee (IKG) in 2003. He initiated the Art Center at the “Svetozar Marković” University Library, where he curated the visual arts program from 2008 to 2012. He is the founder and co-creator of the Independent Art Association Third Belgrade, later renamed Perpetuummobile. Since 2012, he has worked at the Goethe-Institut in Belgrade. He earned a doctorate in sculpture in 2012 at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, with a dissertation titled Artistic Strategy. He has exhibited widely in Serbia and abroad, and his works are part of numerous private and public collections. He lives and works in Belgrade.
Goran Stojčetović (b. 1975) is an artist who, despite academic training, found his artistic voice in art brut. In 2024, he defined his entire creative practice and research with a concept he developed—Deep Art. He is the founder and president of the Art Brut Serbia Association (2014) and the Center for Deep Art (2024). Through his personal artistic practice, he developed a distinctive deep drawing technique, which he has been applying since 2015 in therapeutic sessions with patients at the Day Hospital of the Psychiatry Clinic at the Military Medical Academy (VMA), where he also founded the Art Brut Studio. He has conducted deep drawing workshops with a wide range of people in various locations across Serbia and Kosovo, as well as in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, France, and Belgium.
The exhibition, organized by the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art, will remain open until November 18, 2024. The Oto Bihalji-Merin Salon is open on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Saturdays from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Visits must be scheduled one day in advance by emailing info@mnmu.rs.
