"Images of Revelation" Exhibition Opening on Tuesday 4th July 2023 in the Latin Chapel of the Old Fortress of Corfu with the presence of the artist.
Nikola Sarić was born in Bajina Bašta, in western Serbia in 1985 where he spent most of his childhood and early adolescence in this region of beautiful mountains, rivers and valleys before moving to Belgrade in 2000.
One of the most significant episodes of his youth was Sarić’s discovery of the awe-inspiring atmosphere and beauty of the medieval Byzantine frescos of the Studenica Monastery in Serbia, which he believes lie at the beginning of his spiritual journey. His apprenticeship in painting at the Faculty of Applied Arts of the University of Belgrade (2005-2006) and later at the Academy of the Serbian Orthodox Church for Arts and Conservation (2006-2014), gave the artist an intimate knowledge of classic and religious painting and honed the technical and stylistic skills which he would later bring to his own art. In his student days he was much inspired by his study of Early Christian and Coptic art as well as the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna or of the Hosios Loukas monastery in Greece.
Since his graduation from art school Sarić has concentrated on art whose subject matter is culled from the New Testament in a series of cycles - Earthly Stories with Heavenly Meaning, Witnesses, Cycle of Life, Nine Views of the Cross – which represent a personal spiritual and artistic journey. In these cycles Sarić appropriates the iconography and themes of the Parables of Jesus or the stories of Holy Martyrs of the Church and converts them into compositions whose wit, elegance and originality are all his own.
In France, Sarić is best known for a modern martyr painting, his personal response to the assassination of twenty-one Coptic Christians by Daesh terrorists in Libya in 2015, today in the collections of the Petit Palais in Paris. In the stark but eloquent simplicity of its symbolic figures and the transition from darkness into light, as represented by the black masked terrorists giving way to the orange martyrs gathered into a halo of divine light by Christ, this painting perfectly exemplifies Sarić’s stylistic strategies : A powerful concentration of meaning and message through the use of frontal, symmetrical compositions with clear, legible patterns and glowing color.
In his more recent work on view in the Latin Chapel of the Old Fortress of Corfu – the cycles Glowing Darkness and Monuments – Sarić begins stepping away from recognizable references to religious iconography into emptier, more minimal compositions with a new intensity and depth in his handling of glowing light and color. Agnes Martin and James Turrell are among the artists he believes have affected this new direction in his art, indicating also the gradual shedding of his Orthodox roots since his move to Germany in 2011. The ethereal light and deep spaces of the current work, however, further enhance the mystery and mystical resonance of the paintings, so that the spiritual thread that goes back to the epiphany of the Studenica Monastery remains unbroken to this day. Seven icon-like paintings from Sarić’s earliest series « Heavenly Stories with Earthly Meaning » (2014) depicting the Parables of Christ, are also on show at the Byzantine art museum of Antivouniotissa in Corfu. They establish a fascinating dialogue in style and content with the 16th and 17th century icons hanging next to them.
An important retrospective – Nikola Sarić – Reflexionen – of the artist’s work was held at the Cathedral Museum in Eichstätt, Bavaria in 2020.
