Goran Đorđević

Self-Portraits: Treatise on Absurdity, Part II is an exhibition of paintings and drawings recently installed in a private Belgrade apartment that is not open to the public.

The exhibited works are details taken from a series of copies of a 1969 painting entitled Harbingers of the Apocalypse. These copies were exhibited for the first time 40 years ago, also in a Belgrade apartment.

A few years later these copies were published in the philosophical review Theoria under the title “Philosophical Treatise on Absurdity.”

In the 1981 letter to the editors, I wrote: “These copies and their reproductions should be understood as a materialized expression of a certain attitude which is in its essence philosophical, but for whose expression letters, words, and sentences are not used.”

Many years later, I came to the conclusion that the skull in the original painting was in fact my self-portrait, and decided to paint detail-view copies of all the skulls in all the copies of Harbingers of the Apocalypse. They are now presented in the Self-Portraits exhibition as Part II of Treatise on Absurdity.

–Goran Đorđević, Belgrade, March 25, 2020