Featured Artist | Nikola Gocic

Nikola Gocic
Nis, Serbia
https://www.facebook.com/NGbooArt

Nikola Gocic (born in Nis, 1980) is an architect by profession and a film reviewer, comic artist and collagist by passion. For thirteen years, he has been publishing his reviews and pieces of artwork on NGboo Art blog. During 2016 and 2017, he was writing movie listicles for the Taste of Cinema website, and since 2017, he has frequently and successfully collaborated on film-related articles with Rouzbeh Rashidi – the Iranian-Irish filmmaker and founder of the Dublin-based company Experimental Film Society. Five of his essays are published in the book Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society (Experimental Film Society, Dublin, 2020).

As a collagist, starting with 2018, he has created numerous short film posters and music single covers for NYC-based underground artist Martin Del Carpio. For Hungarian avant-garde filmmaker Péter Lichter he designed the poster for his found-footage feature Empty Horses (originally, Üres lovak) which was screened at the 2020 edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam. He has also collaborated with German composer and film director Martin Gerigk on his animated shorts Otonashi (2021), Once I Passed (2022) and Demi-Gods (2022).

In February of 2019, he presented his first solo exhibition in Nis University Library Nikola Tesla, and by the end of 2019, he co-curated the inaugural edition of International festival of analog experimental cinema and audio-visual performance Kinoskop where some of his collages were shown at the closing ceremony. His latest two short comics – ‘Exhausted Peace’ and ‘F Mode’, both created in collage technique – were exhibited at the Belgrade International Comics Festival in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, his second solo exhibition took place in a cafe bar Julijan Djupon in Nis, and he also created visuals for five short films, two of which were based on the ideas by Martin Del Carpio. In 2021, he held his third solo exhibition, Hypnos, in the Gallery of Cultural Center of Nis. His 2020 collage ‘Ultrafantasia: The Spirits Gathering’ was selected as one of the 10 finalists for the Artbox.Projects Venezia 1.0 exhibition held in Tana Art Space, Venice, during May of 2022. In his art practice, he merges various and often incongruous influences, ranging from ancient art to experimental films to the 80s Saturday-morning cartoons, into his own esoteric mythology.