With the emergence of naïve art as a new artistic reality on the world art scene in the 1930s, several significant centres appeared, which, like a kind of artistic laboratory produced some of the most significant names in this movement. However, there were also a few artists who formed their artistic expression independently of the direct influence of a particular artistic group, among whom Dušan Jevtović, a world classic stands out, represented in numerous encyclopaedias of naïve art, whose works can be found today in many museums, galleries and private collections around the world. He was one of the most responsible artists to lay the foundation of high criteria for evaluation of naïve art nowadays.

Dušan Jevtović was born in 1925 in Trnava, near Prokuplje. After completing his apprenticeship in a farriery, he joined the People's Liberation Army. He worked as a militia officer until 1959, when he retired as a war invalid with the rank of captain. From 1970, he lived and worked in Belgrade, where he died in 2011. He did his first painting in 1956, and after retiring, painting became his sole preoccupation, and over more than five decades of artistic creation he left behind an extensive artistic production. He exhibited at numerous group and solo exhibitions in the country and around the world (Belgrade, Zurich, Berlin, New York, London, Zagreb, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Paris, Vienna, Geneva, Tokyo...). He received many awards and recognitions.

The earliest works, produced in the late 1950s and 1960s, differ significantly from the artist's mature phase in the later period. The first phase is dominated by the genre scenes from everyday life, often depicted in interiors with only a few frontally positioned figures. Some of the basic characteristics of the first phase are large, disproportionately placed figures in an environment whose depth is slightly emphasized by the perspective of space. The use of expressive elements, especially in the treatment of the background, would indicate the mature phase of Jevtović's work. Then, the focus was on man, a small man, whose strength was depicted by the constant multiplication of figures, by which the artist emphasized the importance and strength of the community as a reminiscence of the bustling rural landscapes of his childhood. The setting was reduced to a schematization of the rural landscape, which would take on the role of a backdrop against which various events related to the life of the peasants would take place, whether it was weddings, funerals, celebrations, disasters, or something else. The artist incorporated a whole series of small episodes into the canvas that compositionally formed a masterfully balanced and harmonious whole. Although we know that when forming his artistic expression, Jevtović did not have direct role models to look up to, we know for sure that he was, through various reproductions, familiar with the works of great masters whose work he liked, such as Pieter Bruegel, Vincent van Gogh, and other artists. Guided by this knowledge, we cannot help but notice certain parallels with the mentioned Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel, who also meticulously filled his canvases with vast figurative constellations in which the ordinary man and his life were the main motif. Chaoticity, joy, longing, the comic, the apocalyptic, all of this makes up the register in which the spectacular rural theatre is taking place. Both artists, in a very similar way, took the peasant, the common man, who was always occupied with some activity or participated in some event, but always as part of a wider social whole, emphasizing that man as an individual was inextricably linked to the society of which he was an integral part, and to which he fostered an intense sense of belonging.

Dušan Jevtović's works still captivate today with their vitality, originality and the universal messages they convey. At the current moment, the harmonious scenes of community in Dušan's paintings have a warning but also a cathartic effect on the viewer. In the year when the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art celebrates sixty-five years of work, as an institution with which Jevtović grew up and matured professionally, we have the pleasure of organizing a retrospective exhibition - Dušan Jevtović 100 Years Since the Birth of the Colossus of Naïve Art.