The Greater Coming Together

Intro-retrospective exhibition of work by Slavko Djuric at Center for Book Arts, NYC, 2024

The Greater Coming Together contains at its heart a double-bind between destruction and creation; singularity and plurality. Djuric’s entangled constellation of artists’ books, prints, and objects cleave into balkanized forms that reach out to each other with pages open wide, seeking asylum.

Sculptural, extroverted, and gregarious works obscure what lies beneath the image surface—an intimate topography many times overprinted, salvaged, collaged, ruined, and redeemed. Each gestural remnant suggests something of the metamorphic labor and cadence of Slavko’s practice, which oscillates between sudden, intuitive marks to nearly-archeological periods of accumulation and excavation. Nothing is wasted—layers upon layers of silkscreen, relief and reduction prints, beeswax, paste-ins, pencil marks, walnut shells, and offcuts—tenderly rescued from oblivion.

Djuric’s interchangeable reliefs (Common Rubbledance; Porta fenestrella; Noble Savage) and double-bound books (InterdependAnce!; Psychographix; Desiderata) are iconoclastic, tense dualities held together by the same forces that would tear them apart. As one’s attention moves from the one to the many, to the spaces in-between, what subsists is a question of unity, and of what it means to be whole. 

The Greater Coming Together graciously borrows its name from a letter written in May 1971 by anti-war activist Samuel Melville during his incarceration in the Tombs:

I think the combination of age and the greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. it’s six months now and i can tell you truthfully few periods in my life have passed so quickly. i am in excellent physical and emotional health. there are doubtless subtle surprises ahead but i feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am i dealing with my environment. in the indifferent brutality, incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, i can act with clarity and meaning. i am deliberate – sometimes even calculating – seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. i read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

Psychographiix, double-bound artist book, 2016, and Common Rubbledance, mix-media interchangeable reliefs, 2021

Title of the show made of handcut letters and a display of various books and objects

Display of visual journals, sketchbooks, objects, unique artists’ books and various other ephemera

InterdependAnce!, installation of three mutually dependent artists’ book, 2019

Portraits of Courage, altered book, 2023

Exhibition of artists’ books ‘The Greater Coming Together’ by Slavko Djuric at Center for Book Arts, NYC, 2024 (north view)

Exhibition of artists’ books ‘The Greater Coming Together’ by Slavko Djuric at Center for Book Arts, NYC, 2024 (south view)

Dirty business, in-situ installation of over 200 monoprints made from student workshop disposable gloves, 2011-13

Homeland Insecurity, corner installation of 10 carousel accordion books on custom designed shelves, 2019

Always, unique accordion book in zig-zag frame, 2023