Posting Notice: Christmas is Coming

Biljana Durdevi, Poslednji dani Deda Mraza/The Last Days of Santa Clause, Via ArtForum.

I’m out of town today so there won’t be much on the site. On a related note posting will be light from here on in, since the holidays have begun. Art Fag City sends warm seasons greetings to our readers with the promise to keep you abreast on all breaking news pertaining to Damien Hirst’s Christmas plans. We know you care.

ArtForum excerpt on The Last Days of Santa Clause below:

The new normal: Tom Holert on contemporary art in Belgrade.

Poslednji dani Deda Mraza (The Last Days of Santa Claus), 2001, an impressive painting by Biljana Durdevic. The corpse of a paunchy middle-aged man is laid out on a wooden table in an old-fashioned morgue, his figure foreshortened and stretching diagonally across the picture plane. His red coat, trimmed with white fur, has fallen open to reveal a grayish undershirt and briefs. He sports fashionable sunglasses, as if transported to his resting place straight from a nearby shopping mall. The young, Belgrade-based Durdevic, one of the few artists in “On Normality” who is widely known outside of Serbia, has invested little empathy in her rendering of this corpse. Rather, Durdevic’s baroque, necrophiliac realism comes across as a scrupulously unflinching, unforgiving, and perhaps even vengeful study in disillusionment. It doesn’t take much of a leap to read this postmortem as a response to a society that counts graphic images of dead bodies among its infotainment staples, sustaining itself through a politics of fear practiced by both ideologues and organized crime bosses.