Braco
Dimitrijević

Braco Dimitrijević (b. 1948 in Sarajevo) came to West Berlin as a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) in 1976. The walled city with its clearly visible traces of World War II made a lasting impact upon the young artist who had grown up in postwar Yugoslavia, and some of his most important bodies of works originated here. For Dimitrijević, as for many other fellows of the Artists-in-Berlin Program, Galerie René Block was a key point of contact during his time in the city; in collaboration with the Program, Block gave him a solo exhibition in his gallery in September 1976. Not long after this, Dimitrijević created an important work in public space: a large-format photographic portrait of an anonymous woman, installed on the facade of the Hochschule der Künste. This work belongs to his Casual Passer-By series, in which he photographed people he met by chance on the street at a specific time of day in a specific place. The images were printed on gigantic canvases and displayed on the facades of buildings and in other public places. Dimitrijević exhibited photographs from this series from 1971 onward in Paris, Naples, Zagreb, and Venice, and also presented them at documenta 5 in 1972.

During his time in Berlin, Dimitrijević created Die Dialektische Kapelle (Berliner Version, 1976: Albrecht Dürer und Dieter Koch). This work belongs to a series in which he produced busts of a famous artist and a randomly selected, unknown person, and displayed them on marble pedestals of equal height. It is associated with a legend he had invented about the “discovery” of Leonardo da Vinci. Dimitrijević also developed the series Triptychos Post Historicus in Berlin. After months of negotiations, he was given permission to make installations that incorporated masterpieces from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, including paintings by Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso, and Manet; he used the original artworks as readymades, juxtaposed them with an everyday household object and an organic item such as an orange, and photographed the resulting piece. By “borrowing” the famous paintings for the purposes of his own art, Dimitrijević anticipated strategies of Appropriation Art and at the same time called established art-historical and social hierarchies into question. Photographs from the series Triptychos Post Historicus in turn entered the collection of the Nationalgalerie.

Berlin also inspired the photographic series This Could be a Place of Historical Interest, in which Dimitrijević, rather than documenting the sites in the divided city that are generally considered to be historically important, photographed the most banal indoor and outdoor settings that have no apparent historical significance. The work consists of forty-eight black-and-white photographs displayed in panels, and was shown at documenta 6 in 1977. Perhaps the most spectacular work Dimitrijević created in Berlin is a monument he installed in the park of Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace). The project was initiated during his stay in the city in 1976, and completed in 1979 with financial support from the Berlin Senate, Lottogesellschaft Berlin, the Artists-in-Berlin Program, and Schloss Charlottenburg. A ten-meter-high obelisk made of white Carrara marble was erected in honor of Peter Malwitz, an ordinary member of the public whom Dimitrijević had met by chance. He had Malwitz’s birthday and the titular statement engraved in gold letters in four languages: German, English, French, and his own mother tongue, Croatian: 11 March – This could be a day of historical importance. The “obelisk beyond history” (Dimitrijević) can still be admired today as a monumental testament to early conceptual art.

Braco Dimitrijević participated in documenta 5, 6, and 9 (1972, 1977, and 1992) and several times at the Venice Biennale (1976, 1982, 1990, 1993, and 2009). A major retrospective of his work was shown at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin in 2016, and the following year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd