Slavko Krunic

Slavko Krunic reenacts famous paintings and classic scenes relying on boundless imagination and sharp sense of humour.

He has a deeply simplified and clean stroke, flaunting a style that is intensively iconographic and cartoonish. Krunic’s painting is extensively fueled with irony and sarcasm, uncovering traits of their characters’ personality, overly emphasising their poses, gestures and specific characteristics of his models. The magnification of their eyes and noses is a typical deformation. Despite all this disproportion, in which the characters sometimes are cross-eyed, have one eye bigger than the other and show pathetic or even foolish semblances, they are nonetheless capable of emitting this magnetic effect and even spark affection. His Naïf Art endowed with immense beauty, inoculates in us fatherly and protective feelings, to the point where we find beauty in imperfection – the more flawed and bizarre, the more beautiful it is.

The caricature then becomes a crucial tool in Krunic’s expressionism, given the way the person’s indole and soul are both uncovered using a wide array of traces carved in his face. This technique allows the artist to convey an impression towards the viewer, prompting a strong critical sense. The characters stare into our eyes, they look at us showing the kind of intimacy often found in those who know us well. They question us with a nostalgic and longing stance and based on the dialogue that they establish, ask us for our empathy. They hold one and all secrets of the world, confessing them to us without saying a single word.

By Pedro Boaventura • Excerpt from Masters of Painting - Volume 1

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Slavko Krunic was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1974. He graduated at Belgrade Faculty of Fine Arts in 1998 and took his Masters at the same faculty in 2002.

He is a member of ULUS – Artists Association of Serbia since 2000, a member of ULUPUDS – The Association of applied arts artists and designers of Serbia since 2011 as well as a member of the Society for art of imagination since 2010.

He has participated in many group exhibitions in Serbia and many other countries and has over 20 solo exhibitions to date. His works belong to private and public collections in many countries. He has won Milena Pavlovic-Barilli Grand Prix prize for painting and his paintings and illustrations are published in many art books and magazines.

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"(Satir)iconography of my work is made by stylized human portraits or figures, composed in a caricatural way, but with a gesture which doesn't lead to strong irony and without an intention to laugh at them. Their faces are covered by kindness and longing: they are surprised at the world they exist in, but more than anything, these characters search for the collocutors from the other side. Main motive is to find more co-speakers."

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