GETO: Handicraft above Everything!

Music programme: Prof. Aleksandra Bengin, cellist and pianist, will give a cello recital by composers J. S. Bach, P. Hindemith, J. Ibert and G. Cassadó.

Exhibition author: Marija Ristić, art historian

Exhibition curator/coordinator: Slobodan Jovanović, MAA’s senior curator

Organised by: Museum of Applied Art

As part of the Salon of Contemporary Applied Art, the Museum of Applied Art will stage Marija Ristić’s authored project entitled GETO: Handicraft above Everything!, a themed exhibition of artworks by the all-round illustrator and academy-trained painter Boban Savić Geto (born in 1972).

The exhibition GETO: Handicraft above Everything! consists of about 220 works by Boban Savić Geto. The exhibition displays Geto’s artworks, the creation of which began in his early school days, continued during his studies at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade and developed further in the first illustrations he made for Politikin Zabavnik, to later branch out into various areas of applied art, which is nowadays enabled by the use of digital technologies. The exhibition summarizes the artist’s works belonging to several creative fields (illustration, comics, concept art, character design, and set design) with the intention of bringing the nature of illustration, its stylistic language and methods of creation into the public eye.

According to Marija Ristić, “a solid, precise drawing makes the ‘backbone’ of the art structure in Geto’s works. It could be said that Geto even draws with brushes. Nothing seems to be left to chance as he carefully guides the viewer’s eye through the complex composition, constantly returning him/her to the centre of the plot. If anything can be objected to his perfectionist approach, then it is definitely his need to control every aspect of his work, which sometimes inhibits drawing impulsivity.” And she continues: “In essence, each artist could present himself through several movements that stand for his artistic leitmotif, core and measure of his aesthetic attitude. Guided by this idea, ‘the elementary particle’ of Geto’s works would have the shape of a double spiral, a smaller and a larger one, which spring from the same point in the form of two waves.”