ArtistSerbian-French
Vladimir Velickovic
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Vladimir Velickovic was seven years old when the Nazis occupied Belgrade. What he witnessed as a child during the occupation of Yugoslavia - bodies in the street, public executions, the everyday texture of state violence - never left him, and it became the raw material for a body of work that spent the next six decades refusing to look away from what human beings do to each other and to themselves.
He studied architecture at Belgrade University, graduating in 1960, and spent three years working in Krsto Hegedušić's master workshop in Zagreb. In 1965 he won the First Prize for Painting at the Paris Biennial. He moved to Paris the following year, and the move was permanent. The city was the right context: alongside Dado and Ljuba Popović, he became one of the three Yugoslav painters who, based in Paris, found their way into the core of the European postwar avant-garde. His first Paris show, at the Galerie du Dragon in 1967, established him quickly.
What critics recognized in his work was an unflinching figuration at a moment when much painting was moving elsewhere. His images depict the human body in extremis - falling, suspended, dissected, subjected to force. He used a constrained palette: black, gray, white, and the occasional slash of red. Animals appear throughout - rats, dogs, raptors, hyenas - as figures of aggression and survival rather than as symbols with fixed meaning. In 1972 he began working with Eadweard Muybridge's motion-study photographs as source material, producing serial works including the "Descent" series (1989-1991) and the "Hooks" series (1983-1991) that investigate the mechanics of movement and bodily vulnerability simultaneously. His approach connects him to the Narrative Figuration movement, which in Paris during the 1960s and 1970s pushed back against both abstract formalism and illustrational realism.
In 1983 he was appointed professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he taught until 2000. He was elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1985, and later joined the Académie des Beaux-Arts - Institut de France. He was named Commander of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres and, in 2007, received the Légion d'Honneur. His work entered the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, among others. He died in Paris on 29 August 2019.
On the Nordic auction market, Velickovic's work appears primarily through Crafoord Auktioner in Malmö, which accounts for roughly half of his 22 Auctionist listings, alongside Palsgaard Kunstauktioner and Auctionet. The category breakdown - prints and color lithographs make up a significant portion alongside the paintings - reflects how his graphic work circulated broadly in Scandinavia. Top realized prices in this market are in the range of 2,500 SEK, typical for signed and numbered prints from limited editions. Collectors looking for his more substantial painted works will find those at major international auction houses rather than the Nordic regional market.