Žolt Kovač

Additional info:

After graduating from the Mathematical High School, Žolt Kovač enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Department of Painting, where he received his M.A. in 2002. In 2016, he received the Doctor of Art degree from the same faculty. He attended the School for History and Theory of Images at the Center for Contemporary Art in Belgrade from 2000 to 2002. He had 25 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 100 group exhibitions in Serbia and abroad (the USA, China, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, France, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Russia, and Macedonia). Žolt Kovač currently lives in Belgrade and works as a professor of vocational studies at The Academy of Applied Technical studies Belgrade, specifically in the department Belgrade Polytechnics. He is also a co-founder and editor of the online magazine for contemporary art, Supervizuelna (www.supervizuelna.com). He was granted the Audience Award at the 27th Memorial of Nadežda Petrović, Čačak, 2014. The artist had numerous solo exhibitions in Serbia, with the the most recent one being in 2021, at the B2 Gallery in Belgrade. “The abstraction that Kovač chooses in order to “escape” from the concept engages elements of abstract language as we historically know it, but does not pretend to achieve a new or coherent stylistic pattern that would represent the cultural framework in which it originated, as such a framework is not possible in an atemporally organised contemporaneity. In a contemporaneity that eludes the logic of the historical organisation of time (post-history) and which is characterised by the relativization of any determined meaning (post-truth), the painting of conceptlessness seems a logical paradox. There is no concept because there is no idea that needs to be abstracted. In other words, let’s localise the humorous question from the beginning of the text: “What was the painter trying to say?“ – “Nothing, the painter wanted to paint.” (Abstraction in the Age of Conceptlessness, Ana Ereš, 2021, B2 Gallery)