Draft:Dragan Ilic

Born in 1948 in Belgrade, artist Dragan Ilic is a Serbian – Australian – American artist, living and working in New York and Belgrade.

He studied art at ANU (Australian National University) School of Art Canberra, BFA, 1974-75. Also, studied at the Millennium Film Lab, Dov S-S Simens’ Film Program, New York, in 1986. He was active within the Australian art scene in the mid-70s, before moving to New York, where he lived and worked over the next several decades. In 2007, Ilic returned to Belgrade, where he founded the experimental performance space ITS-Z1, a platform for the intersection of art and science, in 2009, hosting acclaimed artists such as Stelarc as well as many other international artists.

Over the years Ilic’s work has been featured on television (ARTE TV) and in many gallery and museum spaces, in Serbia and on the international scene:  Documenta, PS 1 MoMa, the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, Queens Museum of Art, NYC, and, in April 2010, at the Museum of Science in Boston, as a part of National Robotics Week. Also, notable were his two appearances where he staged human/robot art performances at the famous Ars Electronica, Linz, in Austria (2016 and 2017, as well as his participation at the International Triennial of Expanded Media, Multimedia Art, and New Media Art - RECONNECTION 2019, in Belgrade, Serbia. In the same year (2019), his major solo retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade was highly acclaimed both by experts and by the public at large. (Citation needed)

In 2022, his feature length artistic experimental documentary film (Re)Evolution 2.0: Cyber Quest, premiered at the BELDOCS International Documentary Film Festival.

Over the past four-and-a-half decades he has created numerous sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, films, as well as videos, audio works, electro-acoustic music, body art, performance art works, installations, etc., and he has experimented with and used virtually all types of media, intentionally combining them in novel and effective ways, starting from the most archaic materials such as stone, minerals, charcoal, graphite, color pigments, and especially pencils (for which he is renown), and across a whole range of standard artistic mediums, materials and substances such as metal, glass, wood, plastic, fire, water, acids, chemicals, texts, as well as his own body, culminating with the utilization of high-tech industrial robots, lasers, BCI devices, cell phones, and proprietary DI Devices etc.

In addition to the name Dragan Ilic, he also occasionally exhibits his artworks under the names Dragan Z & M Ilic, Dragan Ilic Z & M, Dragan Ilic ITS, and/or Dragan Ilich.