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He was born in Bilišani in Dalmatinska Zagora near Obrovac, as a
Serb in Croatia at the sea coast, in 1902. He began doing painting
in 1962. He never attended any schools. His father taught him to
read and write. He began to work as a builder in 1943. Parallel to
writing poems he began to do painting in order to define his poetry
more precisely. Sekulić belongs to the group of the so-called
“marginal” artists, lonely, bizarre, asocial people who create new
forms of beauty. His unusual associativity and ability for
materialization of his intellectual energy as a complete self-taught
was intuitively and instinctively realised. Sekulić is a painter of
the universal, the timeless and the limitless. For him everything is
generalised, from the individual he aspires to the universal, and is
very successful. Therefore his works are the highest achievements of
art brut, not only in the country, but worldwide. |
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Sekulić's
paintings are pervaded with a number of inventive characteristics,
the symbiosis of the real and the surreal, with the character of
almost pure automatism. The superiority of the artist's senses
overgrows the perception of a beholder. An ordinary observer is not
capable of noticing and understanding sensitive structure of purely
pictorial phenomena; his paintings are firstly accepted as a kind of
visual intrigue and are later intellectually experienced. The artist
prefigured the symbiosis of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures,
where all the alchemy of his pictorial expression is clearly
visible. It is paradoxical that the artist’s very style counteracts
the narrative aspect of the painting and concentrates totally on the
pictorial value with the strength on an unconscious neo-primitive.
His palette is restricted. He often paints surfaces with different
applications of transparent colours, one over the other, without
waiting for the earlier layer to dry, which leads to mixing and
assimilation of colours. One colour is often predominant in each
painting, which sometimes creates a monochrome impression.
Allegories and metaphors are present in nearly all his works. With
his visions he reduced a unique pictorial definition, minimized the
subject matter to a metaphor. Most numerous are his compositions
with human figures, portraits and scenes with historical and
mythological beings. While painting historical personalities, he
portrayed the victims as heroes, and the members of his family as
mythological being. In many works there are “philosophical” stories
and moralising lessons. Figures are simplified, flat and highly
stylised. |
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Jelengrad (Deer-City), 1948, oil on cardboard, 74x97cm |
A Girl on the Beach, 1975, oil on cardboard,
69,5x95cm |
Nature Walks over the Sky, 1974,
oil on cardboard, 102x70cm |
Jabučilo and
Momčilo, 1974,
oil on cardboard, 70x100cm |
The Germ of Life, 1974, oil on cardboard, 72x102cm |
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MUSEUM OF NAÏVE AND MARGINAL ART -MNMA