He was born in the village of Leskovac in 1920. He's been doing sculpture since 1957.

 

… Bogosav hovers around one primordial image in all his work. That's an indestructible chain of life in which things and creatures appear and disappear, give birth to one another and devour…
The world is a whole - creatures and things are just the expressive forms of that omnifarious One…
(Oto Bihalji Merin in the catalogue from the exhibition of Bogosav Zivkovic´s works in the Gallery of Primitive Art in Zagreb in October 1962)

Using the technique of relief and azure engraving and through totemic composing he converts deep layers of his dreams and imagination into vertical compositions where every single figure is the beginning of the next one.
An accentuated narrative in the form of a frieze or a web of figures which wraps up a tree, as well as softly rounded lines of his forms, point to peculiar sensuality.
Like in Indian totems, Bogosav wraps his trees up with creatures known only to himself, created in the moment of uniting the artist's love for wood and his wish to breathe his own spirit into it…
• • •

... I was chased by a snake over my little meadow one night and wherever it curved it left slimy traces of its body.
And then I dreamt one night a snake winding around and squeezing a man, so I got up and, drowsy though I was, I carved a man and a snake…
• • •

He has had one-man shows in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Jagodina, Zagreb, Edinburgh, Vienna, Paris, Bratislava, Warsaw, Brussels, Stockholm, Munich, Amsterdam, Mexico, California, South America …

The greatest collection of Bogosav Zivkovic's works is in the possession of the Museum of Naive Art in Jagodina.


 

Monograph::

Bihalji Merin O., Dreams and trauma in wood, Yugoslavia, Belgrade 1962
Koviljka Smiljkovic, Naive Art, in: The History of Serbian Culture, Gornji Milanovac, Belgrade 1996
Koviljka Smiljkovic, on Bogosav Zivkovic in: A Key to Making Dreams Come True, Zemun 1999
N. Krstić, Bogosav Živković in: Naive Art in Serbia, MNU Jagodina and SANU Belgrade 2003

Monographic catalogue:

Kojic Lj., Bogosav Zivkovic, MNA, Jagodina 2001

 

Encyclopaedias on naive art::

Bihalji Merin, O., Naive artists of the world, Mladost, Zagreb1972
Boskovic, M., Masirevic, M., Self-taught artists in Serbia, Torino 1977
Boskovic, M., Masirevic, M., A Monograph, MNA Jagodina 1979
Dimitrijevic, K., Naive art in Yugoslavia, Belgrade 1979
Bihalji Merin O., Tomasevic N., Encyclopaedia of Naive Art, Belgrade 1984
Kojic Lj., on Bogosav Zivkovic in: Serbian Naive Art, Belgrade 1993

Bitka sa sekirom, 1962,
ulje-staklo, 21x25cm

Snovi i misao,
detalj stuba

Kamen iz čarobnog vrta,
detalj