About Nikola Savic

Born in 1973, Belgrade, Serbia where he completed his BA Fine Art degree in 1997. He post-graduated the MA Fine Art degree from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design London in 1999. The following autumn, Savic was selected by Ida Branson Memorial, England as one of the best MA Fine Art post graduates in the UK. In the year 2001, he was invited to participate in Royal run auction ‘Save the Ocean’ and to create one of the 54 playing cards, alongside with names such as Damien Hirst, Julie Verhoeven, Anish Kapoor, Craigie Atchison, Mat Collishaw, to name just a few. From 1999 Savic has extensively exhibited at both solo and group shows in the UK and Europe. He was showing with Flora Fairbairn Projects, London; Contemporary Arts Society, Art Futures, London; Royal Summer Exhibition selected by David Hockney and Allen Jones, London; Rollo Contemporary Art; MOCA Belgrade; Cologne Art Fair, St James’s Church, Zero 10 Gallery, London; Zvono Gallery, Vienna Art Fair; Cologne Art Fair; Moscow Art Fair, Bolzano Art Fair, etc.

In his paintings Savic contemplates on post apocalyptic visions of our contemporary society. Focusing on his trademark object machine like shapes, he highlights the importance of the meaning coming directly from its post object-painting reference. His authentic quasi-organic forms take on canvases, star shaped boards, stainless steel and many other surfaces. Savic explores colour and form in savvy neo formalist way, where the colour is super flat and strongly led by hard edged and reconstructed mechanical forms. The biomorphic objects in his paintings usually have a kind of anaglyph float effect that reflects itself through perspective of spaced out machine parts. These paintings are complexly beautiful and they challenge traditions of abstraction through the new abstract language order. Multiplicity of Savic’s classical irregular shapes and rectilinear geometrical forms take new place in the realm of Industrial-Spatial and post abstract constructions. Savic’s forms are more moderate and in tune with our current industrial reorganization of form and object. Savic’s paintings are in close relationship to Post American Art where we can recall Jasper Jones’s stars and John Chamberlain’s car constructions, hence his titles often recall American visions like: ‘Beverly Hills Fever’, ‘Manhattan Toys I’, etc. However Savic’s paintings do not recall ‘so familiar’ pop icons that we are used to see in American Pop Art culture. They take on global Pop Art iconography which Savic sees in the representation of Virtual Reality, 3D, superficial similarity, first contact, Outer Space Affairs and all other artificial generated identities. In a way, Savic explores a constant change of abstract painting today; the change, which is affected by all important social aspects of our times. In that respect he is mostly intrigued by the change of perception of ‘object painting’ of today, in comparison to the visual and theoretical laws of the same seen twenty years ago. As seen through our today’s lenses of high speed communication and culture, object painting has become paradoxically more metaphysical in its nature although through newly possible plastic elements that often associate to computer age and nature. Object painting has changed to a more biomorphic sort of formula that has regained quite strange objective quality that was ones associated with a monochrome.