Biographical references
1934-1940 Early childhood


1941 - 1952 School years in Valjevo

1953-1957 Belgrade, Academy of Applied Arts




1957-1959 Belgrade, Academy of Fine Arts
Following the expulsion from the Academy of Applied Arts, a second chance smiled upon him in his career as a painter. Professor Ivan Tabaković,
who appreciated his work and did not agree with the decision, recommended
Ljuba to his colleague from the Academy of Fine Arts, Professor Marko Čelebonović. Ljuba was accepted in Čelebonović’s class, as a student of the fourth year. This exceptional pedagogue supported Ljuba in the pursuit of his own artistic expression, restricting his interventions to occasional friendly advice. At that time, Ljuba had already had a fairly good place for work, which he had found a year before and which he had refurbished with the help of his fellow
students Nikola Rudić and Miša Martinović. That was a spacious hexagonal dome nestled on top of a multi-storey building in Zagrebačka Street, overlooking the Sava River and opening to the sky. Through five upright vertical windows, the beams of yellowish light interspersed the darkness in the studio, creating a curious interplay of shadows. Many paintings made between 1957 and 1959 bear in their titles the reminiscence of the studio: Phantoms of the Attic (1958), Attic Nude (1958), The Green Image of the Attic (1959), etc. The paintings of this period are dominated by the
human figure, often effaced, motionless and confined in an airless space filled with clueless apprehension. His palette ranged between yellow ochre and burnt umber, with occasional hints of red and green shades. At the student exhibition that traditionally closed each academic year, Ljuba’s paintings captured the attention of Leonid Šejka, the founder of the Mediala art group and the creator of its theoretical framework. Šejka’s idea of a synthesis between the Renaissance tradition and modern thought had already earned him the status of a paragon in Ljuba’s eyes and Ljuba was all the more honoured when this charismatic figure, unrivalled in the artistic circles of the
time, promptly told him: “You are one of us”. The following year, Ljuba exhibited two paintings at Mediala’s third exhibition, held at the Grafički kolektiv gallery.
Their friendship, which germinated at that time, fuelled by a strong initiation
element, would end abruptly in 1970, with the death of Leonid Šejka. The presentation of the Urvater collection in 1959 was the first exhibition of Surrealist art in Belgrade. For the first
time, Ljuba was able to see the original works of Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Rene Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, etc. He was greatly impressed by the originality and quality of individual
paintings but he could not find a single shared feature between the Surrealist
doctrine and his own artistic impulses. A surrealist overtone can only be found
in the personal writings from his youth, which he usually referred to as Temperatura dana (Day’s temperature).


1959-1963 Military service and graduation


1963 - 1964 Settling down in Paris and the first exhibition



1965 Studio at Charenton

1966 Montparnasse



1967 Studio in the Odessa Passage


1968 The first large-scale paintings


1969 A house on the island of Vrnik


1970 New friends, the birth of the first daughter, and father’s death


1971 The first monograph on Ljuba’s art



1972 A burst of eroticism


1973 Artistic mastery
1974 New York

1975 The last days in the studio in the Odessa Passage




1976 Anamorphoses and a homage to Goya


1977 Painting a triptych and a trip to Israel

1978 Love-Monster


1979 One triptych replaced with another


1980 Ice blue


1981 Crucifiction


1982 From The Island of Death to Ecstasy

1983 The first huge landscape


1984 “Man Will never Be God”

1985 Water, forests, flying monsters



1986 Tenderness and sensuality

1987 The Children of Hell

1988 The fiction of the Crucifixion


1989 The studio on Jakljan, the son’s birth

1990 The devil is in the detail


1991 The Last Summer on the Adriatic Coast

1992 Beauty and evil

1993 Sun’s Death

1994 Black romanticism


1995 The Abode of Ghosts


1996 The naivety of times past

1997 The Death of a Maiden

1998 Endgame

1999 Tombs for history

2000 The Secret of the Red Door


2001 Deliverance through paintings

2002 A Dream of Flying

2003 Shadow and Light


2004 The history of heads

2005 The Dream of Poisonous Flowers

2006 Large format


2007 The Expulsion from Paradise


2008 A very personal hell


2009 Planetary mission


2010 A Walk after Death


2011 Is there an afterlife?



2012 A painting in a castle

2013 A year without large formats


2014 Hasty, more expressive


2015 Macabre and romantic


2016 The last paintings

