ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

A brief and embellish version of my miserable life in Belgrade

I was born on September 2, 1945, in Belgrade, on Narodnog Fronta Street; before the Second World War the street was called Kraljice Natalije Street. First we – my honorable parents and I – lived on Rumunska Street, up in Dedinje (later called Užička Street). Then, for some reason or other, we moved to 17 Šajkaška Street. That’s down by the Dunav train station. When the city authorities inexplicably tore down that beautiful building in the French style, we moved to 115 Cvijićeva Street near the Novo Groblje Cemetery.  Some ten or so years later, we moved to the suburbs, out in the sticks, to 21 Jablanička Street. Much later I finally got an apartment of my own, a tiny space of freedom in the neighborhood of Senjak, more specifically on Prahovska Street that used to be called Američko Sokače. When Marinela’s parents left this world, I settled down in the center of town on General Ždanova Street, which was given back its old prewar name of Resavaka Street several years ago.

First my half-deaf maternal aunt Stojanka tried with might and main to get me to learn the upholsterer’s trade and become an upholsterer like her brother, my uncle Pedi. Then I tried to be an army pilot in Mostar. Since I wasn’t very good at this either and I didn’t like the boring cadet crowd, I went back to Belgrade. I took a two-year drawing and sculpting course at 122a Šumatovačka Street. Finally, in 1964, one year after the earthquake in Skopje, I enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. My teachers at the Academy had embarrassingly little talent and even less education; a lethal mixture of mediocrity, bootlickers and conceited phantoms. I had no other choice but to travel around the world and educate myself as best I could, so that using my meager forces, I succeeded in shaking off the invisible yoke of wide-ranging provincialism. I was given an atelier exactly thirty years later at the so-called Staro Sajmište that was a German concentration camp during the Second World War. Sometimes as I listen to quiet music in the atelier, it seems to me that the sorrowful souls of the slain inmates come to visit and politely say hello.
Belgrade, 2009

Dragoljub Raša Todosijević (1945, Belgrade, Serbia). He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1969. He has been a member of ULUS since 1971. He has exhibited independently and within group exhibitions around the world. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Archivio Francesco Konz in Verona, The Roland Gibson Collection, Gallery of Ingrid Dacić, the Široki Brijeg Collection, private collections of Vladimir Macura, Igor Čuček, Hubert Kloker and Slavko Timotijević. He lives and works in Belgrade.