Vuk Jevremović: Human Gestures

Exhibition opening: Thursday, 10. 9. 2026 at 19.00, Vetrinj mansion, lobby
Guided tour: Thursday, 24 9. 2026 at 17.00, Vetrinj mansion, lobby

StopTrik's exhibition of Vuk Jevremović’s work offers only a small glimpse into the varied oeuvre of this prolific painter and animator. On view are two paintings and a selection of handcrafted frames from three of his films.

The paintings anchor the exhibition's engagement with the festival 's theme of media self-awareness and the nostalgia for bygone art forms. The Cathedral (1988) presents a sacral architecture stripped of religious symbolism - a lifeless space where death reads not as transcendence but as sheer nothingness. The Machine (1999), an industrial, brutalist form that served as a visual reference for Vuk's film The Island of the Dead (2011). For the artist himself this work symbolises his transition from painting into animation. 

The selected film frames - painted and drawn on A4 paper sheets - come from three of his works: The Panther (1998), 11 (2022), and Moral Support (2024). Their aesthetics is deeply rooted in Vuk's painterly practice, where brushstroke, texture, and layering carry the same weight and presence as they do on canvas. These works bear the marks of time, labor, and material, standing in quiet opposition to the frictionlessness of contemporary audiovisual media. Rather than nostalgia, they offer a meditation on disappearance and persistence - on what it means to continue working with tools and processes that the present no longer requires, yet still needs.

Vuk is a Yugoslav who grew roots on the Dalmatian island of Hvar but has never lost his Belgrade accent. In 1995, during Operation Oluja, soldiers entered his place but Vuk refused to leave. No pasaran. Today Vuk lives on Hvar with his family, upheld by the support of the island community. His house has become a true temple of life, love, and art, filled with dozens of mesmerising works. I will always remember the week in Jelsa, when Vuk invited me into his home during a difficult time for me. We ate prebranac, drank white wine, talked. From the vinyl records, Viktor Tsoi and Milan Mladenović sang - symbols of a bygone era and of dissent against state violence; exponents of that particular kind of sadness in which only Eastern Europeans can see beauty. Perhaps this is what Vuk's art ultimately speaks of: not the disappearance of media forms, but the persistence of human gestures; leaving behind afterimages, ghosts, and unresolved questions about what it means to make images by hand in a world that has largely stopped asking.

Michał Bobrowski 

Vuk Jevremović

born in 1959 in Frankfurt am Main; graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade in 1984; graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2002. Films: Eon (1995), The Wind Subsides (1996), Panther (1998), Diary (2000), Faces (2002), Quercus (2004), The Wheel Turns (2005), Close Your Eyes and Do Not Breathe (2006), Patience of the Memory (2008), Island of the Dead (2011), Monte Adrion (2016), 11 (2022), Moral Support (2024).