DADO (Miodrag Đurić)

Biography

Dado, whose real name was Miodrag Đurić, was born in 1933 in Cetinje, Montenegro. He grew up in a country marked by war, political tension, and a strong rural culture. These elements would feed an imagination that remained throughout his life archaic, organic, and tormented.

In 1952, he left his homeland to settle in Paris, thanks to a scholarship. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts but soon chose to follow his own path, outside academic conventions. From the beginning, his painting stood out for its visionary force and hallucinatory density.

He was discovered by Jean Dubuffet and especially by Daniel Cordier, his main dealer, who organized his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1958. From then on, he exhibited regularly in France, Germany, and the United States.

Dado developed a deeply personal universe populated with hybrid creatures, decaying carcasses, and mutants both monstrous and touching. His abundant and meticulous painting blends horror, derision, and a strange tenderness. It evokes Bosch, Goya, and even the surrealists—without ever belonging to any of them formally.

Although some critics associated him with the movement of New Figuration, Dado remained an unclassifiable artist, fiercely independent and outside trends or schools.

He settled in the village of Hérouval, in Normandy, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life in a former presbytery turned into a workshop-laboratory. There, he painted, etched, drew, sculpted, built machines and installations, endlessly expanding his proliferating universe.

His work includes thousands of drawings, large-scale canvases, inks, engravings, and assemblages. His technique was virtuosic, almost obsessive, supported by a sharp sense of detail and boundless imagination.

Notable exhibitions include the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1964), Galerie Maeght, the MoMA in New York (acquisition in 1966), and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Dado also illustrated books, including Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. The expressive violence of his line found a natural extension in book illustration.

Until the end, Dado explored the fringes of the body, memory, suffering, and the grotesque. He died in 2010 in Pontoise, leaving behind a vast, singular, and still underrecognized body of work—baroque, organic, and spiritual.