NEW YORK, NY.- Shin Gallery is presenting Ilija “Bosilj” Bašičević: The World Called Ilijada, a selection of works that reveal an artist who, late in life, created a fully realized moral cosmos. His art resists simple answers, embraces contradiction, and affirms, against all odds, the possibility of redemption. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Cavin-Morris Gallery.
Born in 1895 in Šid, a small town on the border of present-day Serbia and Croatia, Ilija “Bosilj” Bašičević came from a Serbian peasant family. He spent his youth as a shepherd in the Bosut forests and meadows, later becoming a farmer, landowner, and father. He was the first peasant in Šid to send his children to school, and in winter he organized literary evenings in his home where neighbors gathered to read Tolstoy, the Ramayana, the Old Testament, and Dostoyevsky aloud by firelight.
During World War II, Ilija was captured by German forces and the Nazi-aligned Ustaša regime and imprisoned as a hostage in Šid. His childhood classmate and neighbor, Sava Šimonović, was taken alongside him and did not survive. Ilija endured the war’s full horror and emerged from it with, as witnesses recalled, entirely gray hair. Where he once saw the world in the clear terms of labor and land, the war revealed a different truth: that freedom itself was two-faced, that good and evil could inhabit the same body, the same moment.
The peace that followed brought no relief. The new Communist regime declared Ilija a kulak: a wealthy peasant and enemy of the state. His land was confiscated, his horses, cattle, and vineyards seized, his income stripped away. He endured forced labor and social humiliation. The land had been his truth, his son Dimitrije would later write. To lose it was to lose the ground beneath his world. In literature—Dostoyevsky above all—Ilija found a language for what he carried: the conviction, deepened by a lifetime of conflict, that all men feel humiliated and insulted, and that the world is, at its core, two-faced.
In 1957, at the age of sixty-two, nearly destitute and physically diminished, Ilija picked up a pencil and began to paint. He started by decorating the walls and furniture of his home; when materials ran out, he painted on books. His first public appearances were met with open skepticism. Was it possible, critics asked, that an uneducated peasant from Srem could produce work of such imagination and invention? He was required to appear before a special committee in Zagreb to draw and paint before them, to prove authorship of his own work. He did so, and continued.
From the pain of his life there emerged an expansive inner universe he called Ilijada: a utopian world where people and animals coexist in joy, counterbalancing the horrors he had witnessed. Though he rarely discussed it directly, referring only to “some Ilijada of mine,” elements of that world recur throughout his work: winged figures and flying families released from gravity, double-headed and two-faced beings, hybrid creatures caught between states, strange animals released from any natural prototype. The elements of his imagined world were philosophical, not decorative.
His paintings are populated by double-headed and two-faced beings, embodiments of a philosophy rooted in duality and moral ambiguity. Good and evil, truth and lies, kindness and violence coexist intimately. “More than often,” Ilija would say, “it is hard to say which is good and which is evil.” His son Dimitrije wrote that the two-faced symbolism was neither spontaneous nor random: a lifetime of conflicts—war, expropriation, imprisonment, the indignity of forced labor—had prepared the way, transmuting lived experience into a visual language of duality. The critic Jaša Denegri called it essential: this unique artist, he wrote, needs to show himself and others as split personalities.
Biblical stories, myths, and apocalyptic scenes recur as as tools for thinking through morality, responsibility, and the human condition rather than as expressions of faith. The scholar Biljana Tomić traced the archetypal iconography of Ilija’s art to the folk literature he constantly read, a broad area of inspiration that stretched from the creation of the world to the Apocalypse, from the Battle of Kosovo to the legend of the Argonauts. While Ilija considered belief a private matter, Byzantine icons, medieval frescoes, and oral folk traditions deeply informed his approach to image and surface, particularly his use of gold. The works are not directly connected to the Bible, though the pretext is certainly there; they are, rather, metaphors drawn from the painter’s feelings.
His compositions exist outside conventional pictorial rules. The architect and critic Vjenceslav Richter described Ilija’s work as “a free, anti-artistic play.” Forms grow and turn and multiply into what Richter called “artistic thoughts,” pushed beyond any natural prototype. In the final years of his life, Ilija entered what he himself named the “thick gold phase”: images no longer made with paint but shaped from oozing bronze powder, poured and sprinkled onto a base and then slowly painted over. The beings in these late works have unidentified physiognomies—no longer quite people or animals, but something further, something that belongs entirely to the realm of imagination.
Critics have reached for many labels—naive avant-garde, naive expressionism, art brut, pure realism —and none have fit. His work has been held in major public and private collections across Europe and exhibited in Basel, Düsseldorf, Rotterdam, Paris, Tangiers, Hamburg, Linz, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Munich, Genoa, and Novi Sad, among others. The painter Gregor Gamulin asked the essential question: “What is he transmitting to us and how can these forms move as though growing before our very eyes, turning in space and multiplying—from the other side of the possible, or more exactly, from the eternal realm of the impossible?”
Long recognized in Europe, Ilija “Bosilj” Bašičević is less well known in the United States. Shin Gallery is proud to present The World Called Ilijada: a selection of works that reveal an artist who, late in life, built an entire moral cosmos. One that refuses simple answers, insists on contradiction, and affirms, against all odds, the possibility of redemption.
