Petricic Exhibits a Belgrade That No Longer Exists

The cover of Dusan Petricic’s new book carries a drawing of a tree, an old, branching tree of life that keeps showing up in his visual vocabulary as a sign that something endures no matter what. According to the note accompanying the book, the artist chose that tree to say his work has held up over time, and that claim has now moved from the cover to the gallery wall. On Monday, September 28, at 7 p.m., the Graficki Kolektiv gallery opens ‘Belgrade, Back Then’, 53 of Petricic’s drawings from the book of the same name, recently published by Laguna. The exhibit runs through October 16, and the book will be available for purchase on site.

This is a portrait of a city that, by the artist’s own account, no longer exists. Petricic dedicated ‘Belgrade, Back Then’ to the Belgrade and Zemun of his youth, a city he says cannot be compared to today’s, which he describes as faltering and hollowed out. That is not the claim of a passing tourist or a casual nostalgic, but of a man who has drawn that city for decades and has real grounds for the comparison.

Petricic is a cartoonist and illustrator whose body of work, spanning roughly six decades, runs to hundreds of thousands of projects: animated film, title sequences and set design for television shows, posters, calendars, theater costumes. The largest and most substantial part of that output still belongs to cartoons and illustrated children’s books, a field in which, as the 2008 retrospective ‘Autobiografika’ already showed, he shifted the standards of the local scene. The individuality he brought to that medium was not stylistic showmanship. It was, as is often said of illustrators of his generation, a watchful eye that tracks and comments on the most sensitive points of a period’s mood and spirit.

According to Irina Subotic, who wrote the book’s foreword, ‘Belgrade, Back Then’ is “an ode to the city, its history and its inhabitants.” That description is accurate, but it is not the whole picture. The book is not simply a tribute. It functions as a picture book for adults, structured so that its 53 illustrations, paired with short texts by the author, work through the city’s landmarks: Belgrade’s museums, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Kapetan Misa building, the Writers’ Club, the railway station. The choice of which landmarks make the list carries its own politics of memory, since deciding what gets remembered and what gets left out is never a neutral act, especially when the person choosing spent half a century drawing that very city for the daily press.

That is where the real question behind this show sits, and it will not be settled Monday evening. It will only be answered once the drawings come off the pages of a book and go up one by one on a gallery wall. Petricic’s work has trained its audience to read it alongside text, whether the context of a daily paper or a neighboring paragraph in a book. Stripping that away, so a drawing stands alone with no sentence in front of it, is a test the 2008 retrospective never had to face in quite this way, since that show surveyed an entire career while this one is a single, thematically closed cycle. Whether 53 images of a city that no longer exists work as an exhibit, or remain illustrations still waiting for their sentence, will only become clear once the doors open.

There is also a commercial angle worth naming plainly. The book is sold on site, the publisher is Laguna, and the opening is timed to coincide with the title’s promotion. One could ask, from a strictly institutional standpoint, where the gallery program ends and the publishing promotion begins, but with an artist of Petricic’s standing that line has long since blurred, and it is unlikely anyone at the opening will treat it as a problem. The question stays interesting mainly for what it reveals about how cultural programming works at smaller Belgrade galleries today: a single illustrator’s retrospective doubles as both an event and a storefront for a book, both unfolding in the same room, at the same time.