Vangel Naumovski
born 1924 in Skrebatno, Ohrid, Yugoslavia (today N. Macedonia); died in 2006 in Ohrid, N. Macedonia
The landscape that I want to see, 1968
oil on canvas
EVN Macedonia
Vangel Naumovski was born in 1922 in Ohrid, Macedonia. First he started to show interest in arts in the elementary school and those interests led him to the newly founded art high school in Skopje right after the end of World War 2. After many disputes between him and his professors in the art school in 1947 he got kicked out of it with “untalented” written over his dossier. He learned the basics of painting and drawing in a woodcarving studio in his hometown of Ohrid and there he had his firs individual exhibition in 1954. His whole life his art was treated as “naive” but he always tended to bring this expression very close to the surrealism and abstract painting. His original rounded forms, reduction of details and expressive colors are trying to show the pure and clear idea of love and beauty uniting the figurative and abstract, the reality and fantasy. We can connect him and recognize some influence from other foreign artists such as Jean Arp and Joan Miro. PhD Vladimir Velichkovski (Professor on Modern art on the Philosophy faculty in Skopje) once said “He took the light out of the paradise and in his own unique way he managed to unite the water, the sky and the earth”. In 1967 he got accepted by the Macedonian fine artists association as a member and that actually showed that Macedonian art community recognized the mistake that was made 20 years earlier by treating him as untalented and not letting him to visit the classes in the only real art school in the country. There were critics that wrote articles in which they mentioned Vangel Naumovski in important newspapers such as “Le Figaro” in France and “Avanti!” in Italy always stating his place between the “naive” artistic expression and the second wing of the surrealism. In 1970 in Paris one of his exhibitions was visited by the famous Salvador Dali who at that occasion said “Vangel Naumovski is artist from the fairytales. I’m not interested in simple naive artists, but here I can recognize some elements that can even be treated as scientific. I’m very interested in the biological aspects of his paintings”. In his later phases he started to sign his works with two other names and his idea was to invent other artists within himself. That’s why we can find some of his works dated in the late eighties and nineties signed with his pseudonyms such as Nav Muan and Van San. The painting from Vangel Naumovski “The landscape that I want to see” that is in property of EVN Macedonia was created in 1968. This “oil on canvas” artwork carries all the specific characteristics of Naumovski’s artistic expression from that time. It is a sensitive composition of pure and simple floral motives, with rounded abstract “organic” forms. The colors are clear and vivid. Here again we can recognize Naumovski’s obsession with nature that is presented to us through a poetic organization of things that we can see, recognize and understand (flowers and trees) with unrecognizable forms and shapes that are placed there to help us end this visual experience ourselves. This artwork doesn’t tend to describe everything that the artist wanted to say to us in narrative sense. It only gives us a direction to think, to reshape and to complete the whole story. How many different viewers, that many different stories. Here, as always Vangel Naumovski is directing our attention to the very simple symbols of love and beauty suggesting that there we should look for the natural “source of life”.continue reading
Naumovski is one of the few Macedonian artists that actually succeeded in presenting his work to the art-world outside of our borders and he got a lot of attention and recognitions. He had 30 individual exhibitions, participated in more than 100 group exhibitions, he received many awards and his work is now treated as a significant part in the development of the Macedonian modern art.Text: Nikola Martinovski
Translated with DeepL.com