This is a collaborative exhibition of the works of Slobodan Vidović and Radoslav Tadić, two Banja Luka-based artists, who persist in staying present and regularly exhibiting in local and regional art shows, here presented together because of their years-long consistent formulation and use of the painting language.

Conceptualised as a synthesis of the artistic practices of two contemporaries working on the present-day art scene of the Republic of Srpska for a decade now, the show provides an insight into the positions of contemporary local painting.

A comparative analysis of the developmental paths of the two artists’ oeuvres reveals a tendency for expression that is unique and largely abstract, which forms the basis for exploring their distinct and quite often contrasting artistic positions. In the case of one of the artists, it is his sensitivity, imagination, and psychological and emotional attributes that are the key elements of his creative processes, while in the case of the other one discovers a propensity toward analytical examination of the nature of painting and its constituent formal elements. The exhibition resulted from the need to point out the continuity and persistence of individual painting poetics on the contemporary art scene in the Republic of Srpska over the last ten years, by recognising and defining their position on the latest theoretical and critical postulates.

Both artists are presenting their new series of works, first exhibited as part of this project at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska in late 2017. Thanks to the collaboration between MSURS and the Museum of Herzegovina, the exhibition will also be on show for Trebinje museumgoers until 26 July 2018. The exhibition was curated by Žana Vukičević, senior curator at the Museum of Contemprary Art of the Republic of Srpska.

Slobodan Vidović belongs to the first generation of painters formally trained at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka, who emerged in the mid-2000s and brought new blood in the art production in the Republic of Srpska, building a contemporary local art scene. Opting for painting as his main medium and obeying the 2D laws of working on canvas, the artist has thus far created series of paintings faithfully materialising his artistic ideas, from an initial deep expressiveness and gesturalness, to a successive reduction in the use of colour and the physical elements of the painting, to geometrisation and increasingly greater conceptualisation.

Radoslav Tadić emerged on the Republic of Srpska art scene in 2007, and over the next few years he created a diverse oeuvre as a painter, while concurrently pursuing a teaching career at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka. This exhibition includes his most recent works, created as part of the requirements of the doctoral programme in arts he is attending at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and they may be said to represent the culmination of his years-long systematic formation of a unique abstract style, revolving around explorations of the material and tactile properties of colour.