Petar Đakulović was born in Rijeka in 1980 where he finished secondary school and then graduated from the Faculty of Engineering in 2005. The same year he went to Venice to enter the Academy of Fine Arts (Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia) where he graduated from in 2009, under professor Carlo di Raco. Today he lives and works in Rijeka and Venice. He received the first prize at Ex tempore Mandrać 2009 and Ex tempore Pazin 2010 as well.

From the very beginning of realism in the 19th century art, photography had an important role in the creation of “mythology of everyday”. The choice of a particular motive, this crucial segment of the experienced reality which remains fixed when shot, is the most important moment in photographic creativity, being also an initial impulse of each work of art which emerges from reality. On the other hand, photography as a medium of “stopped reality” becomes a new reality itself, a possible new motive which will be chosen as a model or a quotation or transferred into another art medium. Following this concept, a cycle of Đakulović’s grisaille work was created, monochrome paintings in refined shades of grey; through precise formation and imaginative play with classic rifinitura they do not evoke the very motive they present (cars, musicians, workers) but photographs grown yellow with the years showing the same motives. While creating the illusion of the “reality illusion”, Đakulović is problematizing the relation between reality and illusion in a manner close to conceptual artists.
Nevertheless, it is only a part of Đakulović’s creative work. Open to experiments and style-nomadism, he is interested in probing the possibilities of the painting medium itself through motives he finds in his immediate surroundings – grandma’s garden, views of the city, on the beach. He confronts carefully painted lazure surfaces and wide strokes in almost gestual vibration; colours vary from subdued shades to expressive explosion of chromatic contrasts; however, light has been the most impressive part of his painting procedure – sometimes, when shining brightly, it makes shadows transparent, imbuing the entire composition in a way worthy of old masters of plainairism.
Being profoundly aware of the real life, so vivid and pulsing in its noise and silence, Đakulović brings us its rarely noticed beauty using simple visual language, with a smile and sometimes with a touch of irony.