Miodrag \u0110uri\u0107, known as Dado (a nickname given by his mother), was born in 1933 in Cetinje, Montenegro. Orphaned by his mother at the age of eleven, he carried painful memories of the years of Montenegro\u2019s occupation, first by Italy, then by Germany from 1943. After the war, thanks to a scholarship, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he attended the classes of Marko \u010celebonovi\u0107, who encouraged him to go to Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
A few years later, in 1956, he met Jean Dubuffet in G\u00e9rard Patris\u2019s lithography studio, where he was working and living. Dubuffet introduced him to the gallerist Daniel Cordier, who was impressed by his paintings of babies. Inspired by De Chirico, Carr\u00e0, and the early Surrealists, these works already displayed the dreamlike realism characteristic of his art. The influence of his origins was evident in his obsession with depicting human misery and suffering, themes shared with the popular oral poetry of the Slavic countries. He masterfully painted strange, mutilated beings, fascinated by the organic processes of life and death, the central subject of his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Daniel Cordier organized his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1958. Shortly afterwards, Dado left Paris for H\u00e9rouval in the French Vexin. From then on, his paintings were bathed in the light of the Vexin. He took part in the \u201cAnti-proc\u00e8s\u201d exhibitions (1960), co-organized by Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel. In 1961, the suicide of his friend Bernard R\u00e9quichot affected him deeply. In his memory, he created one of his masterpieces, La Grande Ferme<\/em>. In 1962, he held his first exhibition in the United States, where he met his future wife, Hessie, and adopted her children. H\u00e9rouval became a place of \u201ctotal art,\u201d filled with sculptures and repurposed objects covered in frescoes, where he welcomed painters, gallerists, and collaborators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the late 1960s onward, he began to explore new techniques such as sculpture, collage, and engraving, which he also used to illustrate fine press books. In 1970, the Centre National d\u2019Art Contemporain dedicated a retrospective to him. In 1972, he took part in the exhibition Twelve Years of Contemporary Art in France<\/em>. From the early 1990s, as war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, his work increasingly extended into space, using abandoned buildings, but he also took an interest in digital art and designed his own website\u2014his virtual anti-museum\u2014as a kind of testamentary work. He passed away in 2010 in Pontoise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n