Jovan Despotović

Jovan Despotović was born in Belgrade on 16 April 1952, in what was then the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. He attended primary school and grammar school in Belgrade and went on to study art history at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade, where he graduated in the modern art group in 1976.

Despotović began publishing art criticism in 1978. At the start of the 1980s he worked closely with a group of young Belgrade artists associated with New Image Painting, the Serbian expression of the new wave, and his 1982 exhibition New Now at the Pinki gallery in Zemun was one of its early statements.

He joined the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in the early 1980s, working as curator of its bequest galleries, the Salon of the museum and the sculpture collection, and later as head of the department of art collections and exhibitions. Exhibitions he wrote or curated included Young 1982, Alter Imago, Art of the Eighties, Geometries, Summary and Yugoslav Sculpture after 1950. He was Yugoslav commissioner at the 7th International Small Sculpture Exhibition in Budapest in 1987 and at the 22nd São Paulo Biennial in 1994, where he presented Zdravko Joksimović, and took part in international projects such as Dossier Serbien, shown in Berlin and Vienna.

He published more than 2,000 articles, reviews and essays, and founded or edited the journals Sveske, Vreme umetnosti, Treći program and Moment. He won the Lazar Trifunović award for art criticism in 2000, and his book Nova slika was published by Clio in 2006.

From 2001 to 2004 he was deputy minister of culture of Serbia and worked on the protection of cultural heritage in Kosovo. He then became editor in charge of the cultural and information desk of Radio Belgrade's Third Programme, served as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art from 2014 to 2015, and finished his career as editor in chief of documentary programming at Radio Television of Serbia, retiring in 2017.

Despotović lived and worked in Belgrade throughout his life. Through the 1990s he was active in the civic movement of artists, intellectuals and non-governmental organisations that sought political change in Serbia, an engagement that led to his appointment to the Ministry of Culture after 2000. Details of his family life were not reported in the coverage of his death.

Jovan Despotović died in Belgrade in his 74th year. His death was announced on 29 October 2026 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, which paid tribute to his expertise, dedication and devotion to the contemporary art scene. The exact date and cause of death were not made public in the reports available when this page was written, and no funeral arrangements had been reported.

Despotović is remembered as one of the principal critics and curators of Serbian art from the 1980s onwards, and especially as a champion of the New Image Painting generation. His exhibitions, his thousands of published texts and his work in museums, public radio and government made him a central figure in the institutions of Serbian contemporary culture for four decades.