Adam Pantić was born in Kragujevac in 1962. He graduated in 1996 and completed his master’s degree in 1998 at the Graphic Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. In 2016, he defended his doctoral artistic project at the same faculty.
Since 1998, Pantić has been teaching at the Graphic Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and in 2010 he was appointed Associate Professor.
He has held numerous solo graphic exhibitions and participated in festivals, conferences, and workshops dedicated to alternative stage forms. He has also taught at several international summer schools organized by the University of Arts in Belgrade and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions abroad, including in Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and the USA.
The lithography workshop has been central to his artistic career, where he developed his visual language and pursued his artistic goals. For nearly a decade after graduation, he remained committed to traditional graphic printing. Later, he explored repetitive possibilities on different materials. His exhibition Flags and Carpets (2007) summarized this concept. The 2010 exhibition Slatko od šumskih jagoda at the Center for Graphics marked a step forward in contextualizing the graphic sheet with other media. In this exhibition, he first combined short stories with traditional graphic sheets, opening the field of the artist’s book, which later greatly influenced his artistic vocabulary.
Following this period of experimentation with graphic language and techniques, he made a significant step in understanding the universality of graphic methods. This led to his doctoral artistic project titled Mira i Mile (tragedija). He staged this mechanical one-act play to demonstrate the possibility of translating a binary graphic principle into a spatial-temporal coordinate system. The phenomenology of graphic language and workshop movement became priorities in his artistic focus.
Seeking the most rudimentary forms of graphic expression, he extended his philosophical and workshop experience into the domain of the kitchen, the most utilitarian creative field, grounded in so-called oral graphic expression. This artistic activism aims for total artistic freedom. From this practice emerged two works produced as part of the University of Arts in Belgrade Summer Art Schools: Grain upon Grain (2015, Belgrade) and Šta je gore to je dole (2018, Petnica).
The results and experiences of the last decade of his artistic work culminated in the trilogy Pas koji gleda dole, which in one part brought him back to the lithography workshop with a new symbolic key for understanding the phenomenon of the image, thus closing a circle of two decades of artistic exploration and creation.
His collection of short stories Vratite me u sedlo is autobiographical but also serves as an obituary to the profession and personality of the JNA non-commissioned officer, which underpinned the organizational concept of the former JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army). The notebook of short stories is conceived as an artist’s book with an extension into spatial artistic intervention; the illustrations of the stories are not in the book itself but exist as ambient and ephemeral works. The installation was created specifically for the exhibition space of the O3ONE Gallery.
This collection of naive and starkly autobiographical narratives should not be called literature, though it could be considered so in a formal sense. Pantić presents this not to show academic decorum but to highlight the spirit of the time in which the work is created and to establish a new inter-genre space for artistic expression. It is an egocentric and eclectic artistic expression that paraphrases academic artistic principles but subordinates them to the simplicity typical of marginal voices. As a self-published work, it carries the weight of engaged art, critiquing all lines of artistic production and deliberately avoiding institutional stereotypes.