Paintings of shadows as a metaphor for Ivan Tabakovićʼs personal enigma
Paintings of shadows as a metaphor for Ivan Tabakovićʼs personal enigma

Summary/Abstract: The paintings of Serbian artist Ivan Tabaković (1898–1977) created after 1954 marked a turning point in his artistic opus. It is an utterly independent artistic concept of an extremely speculative and metaphysical character, which represents a unique phenomenon on the Yugoslav and Serbian art scene of the second half of the twentieth century. The focus of explication is put on a series of paintings, where shadows represent a dominant motif and innovative thematic-genre, formal-linguistic and semantic aspects. They exist as an object-sign, i.e., a symbolic surrogate of human presence. Since certain analogies to those paintings could be found only in the metaphysical artworks of Giorgio de Chirico, special attention is paid to the conceptual similarities in the creative approaches of the two artists. Read in the light of the theory of symbols by Carl Gustav Jung, and observed “in a dialogue” with De Chirico’s works, Tabaković’s shadow paintings represent a metaphor for a personal enigma and the link between two poetically close, but chronologically divergent and independent artistic discourses.

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