As one of the most important elements of American culture in the post-World War II period, jazz was a major medium for the spread of American influence in Eastern Europe. As Ivačković himself recalled, "the Voice of America radio station in Yugoslavia in the 1950s was 'to blame' for the influence West Coast jazz on me". However, the improvisational uniqueness of the musical genre had already inspired great masters such as the French painter Henri Matisse, who fled the horrors of war to Vence, where he created his gouache paper cut-outs between 1943 and 1946, with open and closed, organic and geometric structures as a picture-in-picture composition of his album Jazz.
In the early years of Ivačković's artistic career in Belgrade, between 1952 and 1961, music was one of his two most important points of reference that influenced his entire career. Not only was he an avid music listener, he also became one of the most popular stars of Belgrade's cultural scene with his band, known as Djordje "Bop" Ivačković. At the time, many jazz artists had nicknames, and perhaps not incidentally, his was associated with bebop, a new direction in modern jazz. However, despite his successes, Ivačković gradually abandoned active music-making as a new creative obsession emerged in his life: painting.
Another important point of reference during his time in Belgrade was the exhibition of Contemporary French Art in 1952, which gave the young artist his first exposure to the works of painters ranging from postimpressionism to new primitivism and figurative art, as well as artists such as Hartung, Deyrolle, Lanskoy and Estève, who had been collected under the theme of "abstraction" and who have had a particularly strong influence on him.
In the following years, exhibitions of contemporary American and French trends - Contemporary American Art (1956) and Contemporary French Painting (1958) - marked a radical turning point in his work. The young musician, who at that time only drew occasionally, was decisively influenced in his career when he encountered the works of the painters he had come to know - Schneider, Soulages, Mathieu, Zao Wou-Ki, then Kline, De Kooning, Pollock and other main figures of French lyrical abstraction and American abstract expressionism. What made the most lasting impression on Ivačković at these exhibitions was the analogy between his love of painting and jazz. He spent more and more time painting and moved to Paris in 1961. Prior to his departure, he was not allowed to exhibit his work in Yugoslavia, which shows that he was not recognised as a painter by the art world in his home country.
His monographers refer to Ivačković's creative period between 1962 and 1971 as the "first decade of Paris". After arriving in the French capital in 1963, he organised his first solo exhibition at the Le Soleil dans la tête gallery. This was the beginning of his friendship and collaboration with art critic Jean Jacques Lévêque and other artists who, similarly to him, were involved in jazz music. He participated on several occasions in exhibitions that brought together painters inspired by American music, and in the late 1960s he took part in one of the special multimedia evenings organised during Phil Woods' tour of France. While Woods' orchestra played, Ivačković painted his large-format paintings in front of the audience. The link between jazz and his abstract painting was most evident in the 1960s, but remained a constant and defining element of Ivačković's artistic approach in the following decades. His non-figurative and explicitly gestural pictorialism was recognised in Paris in the 1960s as a particular form of abstraction in the Expressionist milieu.
The next period between 1972 and 1982 marked a turning point and a new era, which the artist himself described as a period of conceptual painting. Although his gestural method remained evident, Ivačković focused on the structure of the painting and insisted that the artistic power of gestures and their pure relationship was the only content of the work. From then on, the white ground colour of the canvas and the square format of the paintings became the trademarks of his work. During this period, not only was his outstanding talent recognised by French art critics, but all the major French magazines and journals regularly published reports and reviews of his exhibitions and analyses of his art. It was also at this time that he became part of the Serbian and Yugoslav art historical canon in his own country. In the 1970s and 1980s, his work toured Slovenia, Macedonia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Philippines and New Zealand.
In the 1980s, Ivačković's painting entered a new phase of development, characterised essentially by more intense colours, the return of strong gestures, a multiplication of forms and more complex compositions. The French art historian Pierre Cabanne described the new paintings of this period as energy structures, and explained the changes in Ivačković's painting with the following metaphor: “Ivačković turned from chamber music to a symphony orchestra.” At the same time, the gestures in the paintings of this period can also mirror many aspects of Chinese and East Asian calligraphy, based on continuous movements. Double Q Gallery’s current exhibition Crouching Harmony, Hidden Tension, presents a selection from this final period of the artist's career. The title of the exhibition is a reference to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍), which is regarded by Asian audiences as the film that brought Zhang Ziyi to Hollywood. Using the above cinematic parallel, we expect this exhibition to spread word of the artistic greatness of Djordje Ivačković across Asia, following the Hong Kong debut of the master, who died unexpectedly in Paris in 2012.
— Mónika Zsikla
