While still a student, Dušan Mandić became engrossed in artistic issues and problems stemming from the history of contemporary art, dedicating himself, in addition to painting, video, and printmaking, to theoretical investigation of the relations between art and ideology, and of transcending the limits of the medium of painting. He is considered the first artist in Slovenia to have transferred graffiti painting from the urban/street space to the gallery space. As one of the foremost ideologists of the Ljubljana subculture scene, especially its visual arts production, he left an indelible mark in the early 1980s on the occurrence of neo-avant-garde movements as an alternative to the established art system, not only by developing a new approach to and conception of painting (new technologies and fragmenting of the visual language), but also thanks to his contribution in presenting contemporary art in the context of interrelated social processes and post-Duchampian and postproductive practices. Equally salient is his role in forming the visual arts group Irwin in 1983; Mandić was the group’s oldest and most experience member, having made a name for himself both among the professional and general public before the founding of the group with 15 solo and 35 group exhibitions and projects in Ljubljana, the capital cities of other former Yugoslavian republics, and internationally, in Italy, Spain, and Austria.

Taking the form of a repeat presentation of his "Die Welt ist schön" project staged at the ŠKUC Gallery in Ljubljana in 1982, Mandić’s first solo appearance after thirty years of exhibiting and working exclusively with Irwin again offers a view of a segment of his early artistic production. He made the series of images-interventions on standard postcards, crosses, and letters during his one-year stint of military service in Niš. In his own words, the exhibition “presents artistic output concerned with analysing a social situation and the standpoint of the subject (author of the exhibition) toward an ideological apparatus – the Yugoslav People’s Army. At the same time, this is a displacement of the subject from a position of apparent control and influence over the circumstances of his life to a position in which he finds himself wearing a uniform, henceforth nothing but a cog in the mechanism of the state totalitarian machine.”

Private D. M. The World is Beautiful

Taking the form of a repeat presentation of his "Die Welt ist schön" project staged at the ŠKUC Gallery in Ljubljana in 1982, Mandić’s first solo appearance after thirty years ...