Naive Painting Serbian School Dragan Mihailovic 1980

Oil on canvas 27.5 cm x 22 cm signed and dated lower right Dragan 80 for the Serbian artist Dragan Mihailovic and the year 1980 unframed Born on February 6, 1950 in Belgrade, Dragan spent his childhood and youth in his father's house in Ostruznica, located about ten kilometers from Belgrade, on the right bank of the Sava River. His love of art dates back to his early childhood. He presented his first works to the public at the age of twenty-two, during his first stay in Paris. After a short period in Montmartre, the only open-air studio recognized worldwide, he began a very fruitful cooperation with the Parisian galleries “Au grillon”, “Galerie 93”, “Galerie Mona Lisa” and the gallery “Naïfs du monde entier”. With naive painting booming in the 1970s, he became a regular exhibitor at the most prestigious Parisian painting salons (Salon des Indépendants, Salon d'Automne, etc.) and at any other major group exhibition. Inspired by the art of the naive painters who were then Yugoslav, he quickly succeeded in his efforts to infuse soul into his paintings and transform them thematically into fairy tales, thus abandoning the old stereotypical themes that most naive painters used to resort to. He achieved his greatest success in Canada, where, as soon as the “Galerie Jeannine Blais” opened in 1985, he exhibited with a few well-known self-taught European and Canadian painters, and became very famous in this region of North America, his works being the most sought-after. During the period 1992 – 1998, at the International Naïve Art Competition, organized four times by the “Galerie Jeannine Blais” in collaboration with TV7, with the participation of a hundred painters from all over the world, he won each time the Grand Prize awarded by the jury. On this occasion, the National Museum of Quebec City organized his solo exhibition from June to September 1999. In 1995, the “Galerie Jeannine Blais” organized on the occasion of the anniversary of its 10 years of activity, a solo exhibition and presented about fifty of his paintings, as well as a luxurious monograph entitled “DRAGAN”. This exhibition was devoted to his entire work executed from 1973 – 1995, while in 2002, the gallery organized his 5th solo exhibition and published a catalog representing his paintings from the period 1999 – 2002. While pursuing his career in Canada, he continued to cooperate with his fellow painters as well as with the organizers of European exhibitions and exhibited his works regularly in Belgium, Spain, Italy, Poland and throughout France. His works can be found in many private collections as well as at the “Musée d'Art Naïf – Max Fourny” in Paris and at the “Musée de Sherbrooke” in Canada.