Dobrica Kamperelic (1947-2020)

Dobrica Kamperelic je umro danas. Kremacija ce biti obavljena u utorak 21.januara u 14.30h na Novom groblju.

Found this on his facebook page. The service will be on 21th Januari 2020

https://mailartists.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/dobrica-kamperelic/

Leben und Arbeit/biography

Dobrica Kamperelić was born in Beograd, former Jugoslavia in 1947. He studied law at the University of Beograd. After his graduation he worked as lawyer in a publishing house. In the 1960s he was drummer of the group The Impossibles. In 1968 he started writing and painting. In the late seventies he began to collaborate with the international scenes of concrete and visual poetry and the Mail Art scene. He participated in various Mail Art projects and had single exhibitions all over the world. From 1985 to 1996 he published the Mail Art-Magazine Open World and he is author of four books. He is furthermore a member of the Serbian Writers Association UKS and the Serbian Visual Artists Association ULUS.

Projects/Projekte:

• 1981 Art as Idea
• 1982 Make Art no Arms
• 1984 World Artist’s Family
• 1988 Art as Communication
• 1990 Feel me

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Literatur (Auswahl)/literature (selection)

• Kamperelić, Dobrica: Art as Communication, 1992.
• Kamperelić, Dobrica: Open World – Open Mind, 1996.
• Kamperelić, Dobrica: The Shortway of Mind/The Diaonal of Presentiment, 2001.
• Kamperelić, Dobrica: The Landing to the New Era of Planetary Art, 2002

Un fraterno abbraccio che ti accompani nel tuo viaggio. b

A fraternal embrace to accompany you on your journey. b

Death is like a silent owl awaiting its prey. That thought passed my mind this morning as I was awaking to the world relaxing with a cup of coffee. Outside my window I spotted a White Owl in the woods. Then, seconds later, I read Bill Gaglione's text on Facebook informing FB friends that the great Serbian mail art networker, Dobrica Kamerelić had passed away. I was stunned by Dobrica's passing. I never met him in person, but Dobrica was always someone of importance, in my writings, and art. This quote from Dobrica especially resonates with me: "I'm still believing in OPEN WORLD and I prefer friendship."

RIP Dobrica. His recent postcards to me, 2019. And text about them (published in my "Dadahomeya Review"). Hope he catched to read it...

Dobrica Kamperelic and his postcards

I am in the strong mail art contact with Dobrica from the late 1990s. Dobrica is one of three main organizers of mail art festivals in Europe. Another two are Peter Netmail (Germany) and Geert de Decker (Belgium-Spain). “Every friend of John Held Jr. is my friend!” – these were first words by Dobrica when we have met in the Belgrade airport in June 2004. These were great days of the “Metamorphoses” festival. Michael Lumb, Pig Dada, Stradada, Karin Meiner, Siglinde Kallnbach, Peter Netmail and other good mail artists and performance artists participated there. And, certainly, Dobrica’s “QUART” group – with goddess Jelica Obodjan.
Dobrica is artist with anarchical ideas. He sincerely tries to make world better. Every mail artist knows his “Open world” zine with a lot of good information about art events all over the world. In his style Dobrica is Dada follower, and it’s not surprise, because mail art is officially using heritage of Dada from Ray Johnson time. And here mail art is simply one of neo-dada movements flourished in 1960s. Another neo-dada movement is pop art, but interaction of mail art and pop art is totally unknown (as almost all related to mail art) – we know only that Ray Johnson and Andy Warhol were friends.
Dobrica uses different techniques: collages, rubber stamps, xerox art. These postcards are rubber stamped. They contain some erotic images, and it’s good for anarchic art. In some of them Dobrica’s wife Rorica is a model. Rubber stamp images have only two contrast colors: black and red, standard for rubber stamps. We can recognize some text labels: “Well done”, “Neo-neural network”. First is obviously parodic, second reflects nature of mail art network as second human neural network. Also we can find rubber stamp from Minden festival from 2002. And some specific for conceptual art characters: star, sign of question, quotes. One star symbol placed in the human head, and it’s typical for conceptual artists too. And, in the strong accordance to the Dada laws, we can see image of usual parrot. Composition of images is non-traditional, it’s rubber stamp collage – and I can see here soul of Kurt Schwitters.
So, Dobrica’s postcards reflect and interoperate ideas of classical Avant-Garde (Dada) and conceptual art.

by Juri Gik (Russia)