Shin Gallery is proud to present Ilija “Bosilj” Bašičević: The World Called Ilijada, a selection of works that reveal an artist who, late in life, created a fully realized moral cosmos. His art resists simple answers, embraces contradiction, and affirms, against all odds, the possibility of redemption. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Cavin-Morris Gallery.

Born in 1895 in Šid, a small town on the border of present-day Serbia and Croatia, Ilija came from a Serbian peasant family. He spent his youth as a shepherd in the Bosut forests and meadows, later becoming a farmer, landowner, and father. Despite only attending elementary school, he was the first peasant in the region of Srem to send his children to University. He organized literary evenings in his home where neighbors gathered to read Tolstoy, the Ramayana, the Old Testament, and Dostoyevsky aloud by firelight.

During World War II, Ilija was captured by the Nazi-aligned Ustaša regime and sentenced to death. His childhood classmate and neighbor Sava Šumanović was taken alongside him and was one of the many executed. Ilija and his two sons escaped death by fleeing to Vienna. Witnesses recount that following his release, Ilija’s previously dark hair had gone gray. Where he once saw the world in the clear terms of labor and land, the war revealed a different truth: that life and death could inhabit the same body, the same moment.

The peace that followed brought no relief. The new Communist regime declared the stubborn Ilija a kulak: a wealthy peasant and enemy of the state. When he finally conceded to social pressure for the sake of his family and gave up his land to the cooperative, authorities repaid his resistance by expelling him from the community and severing his access to farming his land at all. He endured forced labor and social humiliation. The land had been his truth, his son Dimitrije would later write. To lose it was to lose the ground beneath his world. In literature—Dostoyevsky above all—Ilija found a language for what he carried: the conviction, deepened by a lifetime of conflict, that all men feel humiliated and insulted, and that the world is, at its core, two-faced.

In 1957, at the age of sixty-two, nearly destitute and physically diminished, Ilija picked up a brush and began to paint. He started with small drawings and later moved on to decorating the walls and furniture of his home; when materials ran out, he painted on books. His first public appearances were met with open skepticism. His son, by then an art historian, destroyed his first drawings, but soon saw the promise the work held and exhibited Ilija’s work under the pseudonym “Bosilj.” Was it possible, critics asked, that an uneducated peasant from Srem could produce work of such imagination and invention? He was required to appear before a special committee in Zagreb to draw and paint before them, to prove authorship of his own work. He received a certificate of authenticity, and continued.

From the pain of his life there emerged an expansive inner universe he called Ilijada: a utopian world where people and animals coexist in joy, counterbalancing the horrors he had witnessed. Though he rarely discussed it directly, referring only to “some Ilijada of mine,” elements of that world recur throughout his work: winged figures and flying families released from gravity, lovers wielding flowers and visible hearts, double-headed and two-faced beings, hybrid creatures caught between states, strange animals released from any natural prototype, shimmering gold. The elements of his imagined world were deeply philosophical, not merely decorative.

His paintings are populated by double-headed and two-faced beings, embodiments of his philosophy rooted in duality and moral ambiguity. Good and evil, truth and lies, kindness and violence coexist intimately. “More than often,” Ilija would say, “it is hard to say which is good and which is evil.” His son Dimitrije wrote that the two-faced symbolism was neither spontaneous nor random: a lifetime of conflicts had prepared the way for him to transmute his lived experience into a visual language of duality. The critic Jaša Denegri called it essential: this unique artist, he wrote, needs to show himself and others as split personalities.

Biblical stories, myths, and apocalyptic scenes recur as tools for thinking through morality, responsibility, and the human condition rather than as expressions of faith. The scholar Biljana Tomić traced the archetypal iconography of Ilija’s art to the folk literature he constantly read, a broad area of inspiration that stretched from the creation of the world to the Apocalypse, from the Battle of Kosovo to the legend of the Argonauts. Biblical stories, Byzantine icons, medieval frescoes, and oral folk traditions deeply informed his approach to image and surface, particularly his use of gold. The works are not expressions of his faith, rather they were his only accessible frameworks to display the painter’s feelings.

His compositions exist outside conventional pictorial rules. The architect and critic Vjenceslav Richter described Ilija’s work as “a free, anti-artistic play.” His works grew alongside him, beings and structures mutating and populating the canvas with lives of their own. In the final years of his life, Ilija entered what he himself named the “thick gold phase”: images no longer made with paint but shaped from oozing bronze powder, poured and sprinkled onto a base and then slowly painted over. The beings in these late works have unidentified physiognomies—no longer quite people or animals, but something further, something that belongs entirely to the realm of imagination.

Critics have reached for many labels—naive avant-garde, naive expressionism, art brut, pure realism—and none have fit. Long recognized in Europe, Ilija is less well known in the United States. His work has been held in major public and private collections across Europe and exhibited in Basel, Düsseldorf, Rotterdam, Paris, Tangiers, Hamburg, Linz, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Munich, Genoa, and Novi Sad, among others. The art historian Gregor Gamulin asked the essential question: “What is he transmitting to us and how can these forms move as though growing before our very eyes, turning in space and multiplying—from the other side of the possible, or more exactly, from the eternal realm of the impossible?”