Biography

Born 1949 in Belgrade. In 1982, he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Skopje. He also studied History of Art with Archeology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje. His work includes various procedures and disciplines: architecture, scenography, painting, drawing, collage, ready-made, installations, interventions, actions. With his participatory projects from the 1970s, realized outside of the museum-gallery system, he stands out as one of the key figures of the conceptual discourse in Macedonian art. From 1980 to 1985 he was actively engaged in scenography. Together with Krste Dzidrov, he created scenographies for the Theater Workshop at the Aesthetic Laboratory of the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje (1980-1982) as well as scenographies for professional theaters, for which they received several awards.  Apart from Skopje, he also worked and lived on the Italian island of Capri, where he realized a large number of solo exhibitions. He died on December 10, 2018 in Skopje.

Simon Uzunovski was active on the stage for almost 50 years, and for several years he worked and lived on the Italian island of Capri. The most radical artistic breakthroughs were achieved by Simon Uzunovski in the second half of the 1970s with the realization of a number of exhibitions, actions and participatory spatial installations, such as those in the Hall of the Faculty of Philosophy (1977 and 1978) within the framework of the activity of the Aesthetic Laboratory, then at Kora Gallery (1977), Street Action (1977) and the legendary exhibition/installation in the basement space of Maxim Gorky Street (1978 or 1979). In 1984, he participated in the exhibition “New Tenedencies in Macedonian Art in the Last Decade”, held in the Youth Center, Skopje. In the same year, he realized his solo exhibition/ambient installation in the Youth Center. In 1994, his twenty years of work was shown in the Museum of the City of Skopje, and in 1995, 1996 and 1997, he participated in the exhibitions Two Baths. Since 2003, his presence in the Museum of Contemporary Art has become more frequent when he is part of the project “Ideateque” (A selection of documents from the conceptual discourse in Macedonia), “Invisible landscape” 2013, “Solidarity-unfinished project” (The permanent exhibition), 2014 and “The main points of Macedonian fine art in the 1970s and 1980s”, 2020. With his tireless energy, readiness for action and openness to involvement in contemporary art trends, Uzunovski was also present in recent years in the alternative breakthroughs of some of the younger generations of artists, gathered around informal collective action, the initiative “Cooperation” and their activity facing criticism of the institutional and ideologically and politically determined cultural policy.