Vojislav Jakić

1932-2003 · Despotovac, Serbia

He said his vast sheets, swarming with insects and embryonic beings, were neither drawing nor painting but the sedimentary deposit of suffering. Nobody has ever described them better.

The life

Jakić was born in 1932 in Macedonia, the son of a Montenegrin Orthodox priest, and moved with his family to Despotovac in Serbia at the age of three. Loss shaped his early life: his elder sister died of diphtheria and his younger brother of scarlet fever, and later he lost his father too. Living in poverty with his mother, he earned money drawing portraits of deceased villagers from their identity photographs for mourning families. Art school in Belgrade in 1952 did not hold him, and after a failed exhibition plan and a brief marriage he returned home, where he drew relentlessly until his death in 2003.

The work

Thousands of drawings in ballpoint pen, wax crayon, coloured pencil and gouache on paper and wood, teeming with insects, monstrous embryonic creatures and ill-defined organic forms that accumulate like sediment, some works growing to enormous formats. He also carved early wooden sculptures incorporating skulls and bones. His work is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina, Serbia.

Why we love them

He found the exact form grief takes when it keeps multiplying, and had the nerve to draw it for fifty years. The swarm is the self-portrait.

Go deeper

• Vojislav Jakić at the Outsider Art Fair
• Vojislav Jakić on Wikipedia
• Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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