EXHIBITIONS · The Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik - Umjetnička galerija Dubrovnik

EXHIBITIONS · The Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik

ANDY WARHOL: I'M FROM NOWHERE - works from the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce

21.9.2023. - 29.10.2023

Curators: Michal Bycko, Martin Cubjak and Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

The exhibition of one of the founders of pop art in the world, Andy Warhol, is organized by the Dubrovnik-Neretva County in cooperation with the Dubrovnik Art Gallery and the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art from Slovakia. Andy Warhol’s works from the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art will be exhibited at the exhibition, including photographs and silkscreens on paper and canvas. The exhibition maps, presents and professionally displays not only the life and works of Andy Warhol, but also current trends in visual art and culture, the influence of the artist’s ethnic origin on his work, the influence of pop-art on current art and related topics. The curators of the exhibition are Michal Bycko, Martin Cubjak and Jelena Tamindžija Donnart.

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh in a family of Ruthenian immigrants from the village of Miková near Medzilaborc. He had two older brothers: Paul (born 1922, died 2014) and John (born 1925, died 2010). His father, Andrej Varchola, or Andrew Warhol (born in 1886, died in 1942) was a worker and miner, and his mother, Júlia Varcholová, or Julia Warhola (born in 1892, died in 1972), instilled in her children respect for religion, family and traditional values. They lived very modestly and regularly went to Greek Catholic mass celebrations.

Thanks to Andy Warhol’s brothers John and Paul and Fred Hughes as representatives of the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York, and on the initiative of Dr. sc. Michal Byck, the museum in Medzilaborac was founded as a transregionally specific institution of the museum-gallery type, and deals with current trends in contemporary art and especially the life and work of Andy Warhol.

The founding of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborac was preceded by the activities of Dr. sc. Michal Byck, first in the Small Gallery of the Friends of Art Club connected to the branch of Visual Art of the National School of Art and later in the organization of the Andy Warhol Society in Medzilaborac. During the existence of these institutions, the people involved, despite the former political regime, managed to collect a lot of different materials and authentic documents that are now part of the Foundation’s collection and the Museum’s archives.
The Ministry of Culture officially founded the Museum in 1991, and since April 1, 2002, it has been taken care of by the higher territorial unit of Prešov self-government.
The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborac (MMUAW) was founded in 1991 as the first museum in the world dedicated to the king of pop art. Today, the museum is a specific transregional institution of the museum-gallery type, which mainly deals with current trends in contemporary art and especially with the life and work of Andy Warhol.
The museum conceptually maps, presents and professionally displays not only the life and works of Andy Warhol, but also current trends in visual art and culture, the influence of an artist’s ethnicity on his work, the influence of pop art on current art and related topics.

EKREM YALCINDAG
NATURES

29.7.2023. - 17.9.2023.

Curators: Heinz Peter Schwerfel & Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

Beauty can be artificial, especially when it is artistic. In 2023, Istanbul and Frankfurt-based artist Ekrem Yalcindag created a new art series entitled “Nature” — even if his works essentially don’t have much in common with conventional portrayals of natural beauty. His artwork is a representation, rather than a reproduction of nature — its glimpses transformed into works of art, but never their focus. Nature is translated into art in the artist’s highly personal idiom that has long transcended the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction. A fan of throwing together disparities, Mr. Yalcindag skillfully fuses intellectual, conceptual art with his perfectly executed technique.

Heinz Peter Schwerfel

Like the ships on the Bosporus that constantly change the observer’s view with their movement, the new series of works of Ekrem Yalcindag follows the pattern of placing us in medias res, in the midst of things, at the centre of the action, where forms come into and exit from the pictures. In this way the forms seem to be going on with their life even outside the frame of the picture, telling us of the original Romantic idea about our own communion with nature and the mirroring of our soul and thinking in it. Yalcindag is successful in leading us on this journey, suggesting the path with his circles, which are like footsteps trodden in the sand that lead us off into parts unknown.

Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

Biography
Ekrem Yalcindag, born in Turkey in 1964, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Istanbul. His artworks are represented internationally in renowned collections of modern art such as in Istanbul Modern, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, in the EPO Art Collection, Munich/ Den Haag, the Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich or in the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden. After his first art studies in Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir (1990-1993), he continued his artistic career at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, in the years 1994 to 1999, with Hermann Nitsch (his mentor) and Thomas Bayrle. Here, Ekrem Yalcindag starts drawing using the impasto color application followed, in 1994/95, by the development of the first blossom motifs. His art studies in the Frankfurter Palmen- garten soon allowed him to find the characteristic abstract blossom forms for his paintings. And in the same year, he then discovered the Da Vinci brush 1570 size 0 with which he now creates all his artworks. In 1997, the painter created his first Tondos as well the first Camouflage works. Three years later, Ekrem Yalcindag extensively started dealing with ornaments and geometric elements. During his atelier scholarship in the Künstlerhaus Schloss Dalmoral, Bad Ems, he transfers the pattern of paving tiles onto canvas. Here, the first work of the Schloss Balmoral set is created. Eventually, in 2006/7, he refocuses on Tondos. He names the resulting works “Impressions from the Street”, hereby adhering to the French impressionists. One year later, in winter, for the first time, he subsequently designs a mural at a Berliner kindergarten in the Griechischen Allee. He paints further murals for the Kai Middendorff Galerie in Frankfurt (2009), Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen (2009), Istanbul Modern (2010), the Kunst- and Kulturstiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim (2016) or Borusan Contemporary (2010 / 2021). In 2014, engagements with Alexander Rodtschenko and Barnett Newman brought the triptych “Red Yellow Blue” to life. In the new chemistry building of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen he creates his up to date biggest mural: the eight walls of the staircases covered in red, yellow and blue color areas. In 2015, Yalcindag paints additional monochromatic works. had been using to frame his flower motifs, and - inspired by Henri Matisse’s silhouettes - he starts venturing with colorful variations of his line framework. In Red Yellow Blue (2016), he then breaks the strict, geometric separation of color surfaces and intertwines these three primary colors on one canvas. For the artwork set Colored Blacks (2017), Yalcindag returns to the round-shaped format. However, he reduces the color palette to hues of black. And only upon closer inspection, the viewer can perceive the diversity of color hues rendered in the concentrically arranged circles. Continuing to explore the possibilities of monochrome, in the following year, he created works in the colors red and green (e.g. Red Red Red, 2018). Starting in 2018, he produces the works ti- tled Infinity, which appear for the first time in the Kai Middendorff Galerie. With the help of subtle nuances in the horizontal lane, he creates color gradients capable of opening imaginary spaces and convey the impression of infinity. In 2020, Ekrem Yalcindag applies the principle of his color gradient technique, developed for the Infinity-Series, on his round-shaped formats. The perception of spatial depth was achieved by the radial arrangement of the chromatic gradients. In 2022, he transfers his principle of acrylic murals onto panels for the very first time. The less corporeal color material here- by allows a largescale execution of the vegetal ornament. And with that, Sunrise (2022) is created, a Tondo with a diameter of 3.3 meters and a red-orange color-gradient. In his youngest artworks, Ekrem Yalcindag implements his former work representing forms of nature, while dramatically expanding his technical repertoire: in gigantic formats he combines his typical delicate oil painting technique with wood and screen printing. These wall-filling artworks can be seen publicly for the first time in the Kunstforum Wien.

IGOR EŠKINJA
POETICS OF TRANSPARENCY

27.4.2023. - 8.6.2023.
Curator: Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

The works of Igor Eškinja take as their subject the production of the image in contemporary society, in the current age,suffocating in the media transmission of images in all formats. They play with the perception of the picture in this day and age as well as with the concept of the image in the dictionary of visual culture and of art history. In the context of contemporary society, which is characterised by extreme visual saturation with images, accompanied by their rapid alternation, people, which is to say the users of the media space, gradually empty these images of meaning. This is a process of dense cacophony that is marked by the methods of overlapping, multiplication and stripping away of meaning. The definition of the image in the artistic vocabulary of Eškinja is not uniform and fully formed; in his works he subjects it to incessant reinterpretation and the re-reading of its layering. A kind of deconstruction of the image is going on, the artist entering the sphere of the apparentlyBaudrillardian simulacrum in which the concept replaces reality. But the artist here is not feigning the creation of other worlds, working, rather, on the deconstruction of the perception of the world we see and giving us a different view of ordinary objects.
For the selection of the materials to use in his works, Eškinjaresorts to the inventory of the everyday, choosing materials that occasionally we don’t notice in our lives up until the moment when we really need them. Whether it’s a piece of A4 paper, sand, self-adhesive tape, the artist restores to these apparently banal items a modicum of dignity, placing them in the centre of the story, making them the protagonists. It’s important to point out that all these materials have a certain function, a given place in time and space that appoints them their role in everyday life.

Biography:

Igor Eškinja (Croatia, 1975) lives and works in Rijeka, Croatia. Eškinja constructs his architectonics of perception as ensembles of modesty and elegance. The artist “performs” the objects and situations, catching them in their intimate and silent transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional formal appearance. Using simple, inexpensive materials, such as adhesive tape or electric cables and unraveling them with extreme precision and mathematical exactitude within strict spatial parameters, Eškinja defines another quality that goes beyond physical aspects and enters the registers of the imaginative and the imperceptible.
Eškinja’s participated in various group exhibitions: Manifesta 7, Rovereto (2008); Complicity, Rena Bransten gallery, San Francisco (2009); 28th Biennale of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2009); Dirt, Wellcome foundation, London, (2011), Rearview Mirror, Power plant, Toronto, (2011); Ash and Gold – a world tour, Marta Herford, (2012); 2nd Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg, (2012); 8 ways to overcome space and time, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, (2013), T-HT Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2016), Every Time A Ear di Soun – Documenta 14 program, Savvy contemporary, Berlin (2017), as well as solo exhibitions in: Project for unsuccessful gathering, Casino Luxembourg-Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg (2009), Inhabitants of generic places, Kunstforum, Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2011), The Day After, Federico Luger gallery, Milano, (2011); Interieur Captivant, MAC/VAL Museum, Vitry, (2012); Quixote, MUWA, Graz, (2014), PRODUCTIVE WORK_what is it supposed to be?, Q21, Museums quartier, Vienna, (2018), EXPOSURES, Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021).

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
Sophie Erlund, Stephen Kent, Josep Maynou, Igor Eškinja, Mark Požlep

27.4.2023. - 8.6.2023.
Curator: Jelena Tamindžija Donnart

JOSEP MAYNOU
Spain, 1975

Josep Maynou's multidisciplinary approach is both performative and object based. It comes together as a form of contemporary storytelling, a fictional take on everyday life in the form of humorous ideas that expand onto his objects. The sculptures he makes are at once illustrations of these ideas, as much as they are props and stages where the narrative takes place. Maynou uses common domestic materials and practical tools that are often discarded or hidden to create anthropomorphous utensils. His projects are scenarios for action that allow both functionality and absurdity at the same time.
Maynou (Barcelona, 1980) lives and works between Paris and Berlin. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, Faculta de Belas Artes Porto in Porto and Middlesex University in London. His recent solo shows and two-person shows include Return of the Junker. JM2000 (with Jordi Mitjà, curated by Sira Pizà, Bombon Projects, Barcelona), To bow at the beginning not at the end (Collection Born, Munich), Leisure (Bombon Projects, Barcelona 2017), Thing1, Thing2 (Broken Dimanche, Berlin 2017), Things: To do (Beverly’s, NYC 2017) or The Ninja from Marrackech (Galerie Suvi Lehtinen, Berlin 2015). His work has been shown at group exhibitions such as Alpina huus (Le Commun, Geneve 2017), How to do things (Lehman&Silva, Porto 2017), My body doesnt like summer (Haverkampf Gallery, Berlin 2018), Black Garden (Galería Louis 21, Palma de Mallorca 2018), Hunter of Worlds (SALTS Basel 2018); and art fairs such as Arco Lisboa, Code Art Fair Copenhague, and Sunday Art Fair London (2018). His most recent performances include Pane Per Poveri (Laatrac, 14th Documenta, Athens 2017), Making Public Program (Fundació Tapies, Barcelona 2017) and Material Art fair (Mexico City 2016).

In his work, where he uses everyday objects, artist Josep Maynou also touches on the theme of simulations, where he reinterprets motifs from the surrounding consumer world making use of them as platform for the transmission of his message. By being placed in an exhibition venue, objects lose their original function and are transformed into their new identities. All told 34 chopping boards are on show, with messages, incidental sentences and drawings blow-torched in. Maynou’s chopping boards embody the Mediterranean aspiration for socialising with food and the joint preparation of food as an essential item in the process. The spirit of this togetherness is engraved into each individual cutting board that the artist uses like pages of his visual diary during his travels. Drawings and words incised in the boards are an unfiltered area of emotions and thoughts, first steps on the empty tabula that also halt here. On the chopping boards we meet an accumulation of thoughts and sketches that are reined back here, at the level of entrance hall. This immediacy and rawness of thinking inscribes a sincere narration in the work, recording this visual diary at the very same moment of the delight with the idea of a thought that is then written out on the wooden pages of the diary. We can follow the continuation of this visual diary in Chocolate Diaries, in which Maynou uses chocolate wrappers as canvas on which he repeats a similar pattern of jotting down immediate experiences. In his works we can read a certain casual playfulness, an unassuming lack of pretentiousness, though the artist is in no way superficial. On the contrary, his concision and acuteness of expression in this form of fragmented discourse nudges the visitor to take part and fill in the work with his or her own associations about the terms on offer. Printing on everyday objects goes on in the work Pareo, where the artist writes on this beach accessory the words Get pissed to get unpissed. From being an ordinary fashion item used to cover, primarily, the female body the pareo has with time taken on connotations of one of the deeper problems of today’s society. We often associate it with depictions of people from third countries who walking along the beach endeavouring to sell it to tourists from mainly developed countries and it has become fraught with additional meaning. For this reason the artist writes out the words meant to embody this feeling and send a certain message to the person who takes it in.

MARK POŽLEP
Slovenia, 1981

MARK POŽLEP (1981) finished his BA and MA at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and completed an Advanced Master’s Degree in Transmedia at the Sint- Lukas Campus in Brussels and HISK in Ghent. He works in the field of visual and performative arts, spatial installations and video art. His artistic practice involves journey- travels, which function both as long-durational performance/endurance art and as an art piece in itself. It is an intense procedural exploration, aiming to reveal the tension between politics, poetics and individual action.
His work has been presented in numerous group and solo exhibition, including EKO 8, International Triennial of Art and Environment / A Letter to the Future, UGM, Maribor, L’Eet Domino, Manifesta 13 - Les Parallèles du Sud, Nice; Contour Biennial 9-Colton as Cotton, Mechelen ; Southwind, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Cold Wind From The Balkans, Pera Museum Istanbul; Resilience, 7th Triennial of Slovenian Contemporary Art, MSUM Ljubljana; The Event , 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Cultural Hero , II Biennial of Quadrilateral/BQ_2, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rijeka; U3 , Fifth Triennial of Slovenian Contemporary Art, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Essl Award Winners , Essl Museum, Vienna/Klosterneuburg.

The cinematic essay called Hogshead 733 follows the story of the voyage the artists Maxime Berthou and Mark Požlep undertook between August 23 and September 21, 2015. From the starting point of Trébeurden in Brittany to the final destination of the Isle of Islay in Scotland, the two artists underwent various experiences that would test out the limits of their endurance and also raise the issue of the very pointfulness of setting out on this journey. All told 20 drawings done in charcoal, crayon and watercolours follow the cinematographic essay like a camera that has been found with undeveloped film waiting to come to light. The work, which was created five years after the journey was done, with its expressive strength tells of the still powerful memory of the experience undergone and the traces they left on the artist. The boat Soutien de famille made of white oak in 1942 was at once refuge and home to the artists and their greatest nightmare. The shortcomings of the boat, at first not visible after the slapdash restoration, resulted on many occasions in the near sinking of the vessel while it was crossing the Channel. The unbearable cacophony of sounds that they heard during the voyage or that they seemed to hear is translated in the drawings into rapid strokes and agitated compositions with just the occasional fare of choppy red crayon and watercolour. These are sections of memory in which dark reigns, night scenes in which the fear of the inchoately vast stretches of the sea and the power of nature was the most sensitive. Some of the fashes of colour indicate the depiction of areas and torches for rescue during distress at sea which were actually not used by the artists. We can distinguish three stories worked out in the drawings: the boat theme, the relation of Maxime and Mark and the dialogue with the sea. The composition is choppy and synthesises the omnipresent sense of danger, uncertainty and fear that the author says he still feels, this powerful feeling not having passed after the elapse of five years. Exhaustion and sea-sickness, the buffeting of the waves, the unceasing rocking and absence of an even surface would contribute to the creation of the agitation of the depictions, produced by alternating close-ups and distant views. It is a story about a journey, an inheritance and friendship, an Odyssean trip in which the separate microcosm of the boat in which the authors live and the outer world with all its natural laws complement each other. The maritime wanderings were to end in the boat being broken up and a barrel of whisky being made of the planks of white oak, the absorbed sea salt in the wood affecting the taste of the liquor. The actual journey is looked upon as a work of art, a separate life. The author says that he already has his own perspective, his own opening into the world, and endeavours in his art work to create situations in which he himself would like to change something.

SOPHIE ERLUND
Denmark, 1981

Sophie Erlund is a Danish born artist living and working in Berlin. In her practice, Erlund has long explored a variety of themes and questions about the more-than-human, creating sculptures, installations and complex soundscapes, which deal with the central theme of transition and understanding the world through the irrational mind, and in particular our ongoing entanglement with artificial intelligence and its impact on our psychology. Sophie Erlund’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Europe and the US since receiving her BA Fine Art degree with honors from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London (UK) in 2003.

Sophie Erlund, Stephen Kent, Igor Eškinja, Mark Požlep and Josep Maynou here create their own Decameronish narration, which impinges, every day of the residency, ever more tightly, on the development of a fabula that unfolds at several levels. Fabula here does not flow linearly, its narrative consisting rather of fragments accumulated during extended evening conversations interrupted by the clinking of glasses and cutlery. Artist Sophie Erlund devotes herself to these moments, bringing them together in her soundpiece she calls “One month and two burners”.
In this work we have the occasion to hear fragments of conversations, which are sometimes intelligible, sometimes identifiable only by voices in the distance, the laughter of people conversing, profound statements and quotes from philosophers with jokes, muttering and humming, the sound of work on materials: drilling, scraping, sawing and ambiental sound. Interwoven into the deafening cacophony are moments of calm, morning stillness accompanied with the incidental song of migrating birds on their way south or the half-wild goats that dominate the landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana mountain chain, the nocturnal rustling of leaves and the calm of late hours filled with long moonshine. We respond to the accumulation of fragments of the separate moments in the piece as to an abstract poem, an ode to a period. Although sculpturally located in the space of a group exhibition, the powerful impact of the acoustic work is manifested in the sculptural formation of the mental space of visitors to the show. The soundpiece pervades the exhibition, subtly suggesting the context in which the works were created and perpetuating their point of departure. The artist’s reliefs refect the process of long-lasting working of wood, of meticulous execution. As during the carving of a totem, in sculpture Erlund inscribes total devotion to the object that absorbs spirituality, embodying the spirit of animism and the nature of the cult. The smooth surface varnished in dark tones continues its fluidity in the impressed fragmented objects. She shapes resin in the form of a hemisphere into which she impresses objects from the surrounding, creating an abstract form. The intensely coloured abstraction is picked up in the impressed parts of glass that the artist decorates. Wood, with its fullness and vitality, is contrasted with the transparency of the impressed parts that relieve the heaviness of the wooden sculpture. In contrast to the natural materials of which the sculpture is made there are associations of the current post-modern world that like misreading of codes on the monitor impairs the visual clarity. Wires and chips take the observer of again into the current context in which technology like a parasite on a tree intrudes into all its pores, finding holes in which it can live some longish period. This search for forms is continued in drawings place alongside the sculpture that, in the words of the artist, represent her field of expanded freedom. All told there are 18 drawings making up the base for the artist’s experiment in searching for forms that appear on the surface like a halted microscopic view. Forms interfuse in a limited range of colours. The absence of clearly defined borders creates an unpredictable world of interweaving of forms, in which there is the circle shape that is presented repetitively in compositional variations on the theme. The interlinking of forms suggests the inevitable involvement of human beings in this world of forms where in the microscopic view our specious domination in the world is done away with in the depiction of cellular organisms.

STEPHEN KENT
USA, 1985

In his ceramics, paintings and mosaics, Stephen Kent demonstrates his engagement with psychedelic culture and comparative mythology. He works with found everyday imagery and design originally intended for domestic consumption and amplifies its strange and disorientating possibilities with his meticulous and invested craft processes. Kent explores cultural codes that can be found embedded in everyday objects and scenarios. With a medium refexive approach, he uses a process-oriented language to humorously investigate the stuf our world is made of.
Stephen Kent (1985, USA) lives and works in Berlin. Kent received a Master of Fine Arts at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania State University. He has recently exhibited with Elephant Kunsthall in Norway, Good Weather Gallery in the U.S., LVL 3 in Chicago, Haverkampf Leistenschneider Galerie in Berlin, Szydlowski Galeria in Warsaw, Renata Fabbri Gallery in Milan, and Die Brücke Museum, Berlin. His mosaic works have been written about in publications such as Der Tagespiegel and the Chicago Tribune.

While creating worlds within worlds in today's age of visual super-saturation one arrives at the simulation of created worlds where the questions are posed of possible boundaries and in general of the problem of the placing of the border of the illusionary and the real. The work of Stephen Kent actually re-examines the very concept of the image and its meaning in today's world. In his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Wittgenstein says “the borders of my language mean the borders of my world” which leads to raiding the visual inventory in the search of added answers. Kent is of the opinion that the “image comes into being when language lets us down, when we do not know any longer how to explain something... and then we begin to understand, to obtain a wider perspective”. The works of Kent at the group show can be divided into two sections according to the technique he uses in creating or building the picture. In the mosaic paintings, Kent uses the technique of mosaic that he appliqués to the already visually saturated support of aluminium dibond. This artist explores the area of hyperproduction of images in which they are always created with amazing speed and with the accessibility of today’s technology of movie and still camera, integrated into all the technological devices that we use. Kent embarks on his research finding various compositions from photographs of personal albums, from the Internet, photographs of textiles from which he extracts the most interesting frames. Kent manipulates his visual material, independently determining the relation of firm and blurred boundaries in the image. It is important to point out the relation of author and other people’s photographs that during this process he appropriates. Adding further layers of oil, acrylic and plaster onto the canvas, Kent goes on building a picture of fragments, on which a dominant colour charge prevails. The principle of building the image is more visible in the images-mosaics where the artist instead of ceramic tesserae with a clearly marked form makes and uses what is called trencadis, bits of broken ceramic tiles and stone which he inserts into his work. Sequencing his mosaic on an appropriated photograph, Kent creates a new narration of his own in which the visual worlds of photography and painting are confronted, the consumerism of mass production and tendentious manual work multiplication and simplification, the gloss of photography and the powderiness of cement that binds the mosaic, the excessive ornamentalisation of the external world that incessantly obtrudes into our visual field creating new needs and the actual mosaic as embodiment of the closed spaces that invite contemplation of human life.

IGOR EŠKINJA
Croatia, 1975

The artist who in his month-long residency spent time in Spain perceives a similar infrastructure problem of Mediterranean countries, coming from the same kind of setting of his home country Croatia. The boom in investment has turned the wild coasts of Mediterranean countries into huge building sites for luxury holiday homes and buildings that attempt to sell the idea of the Mediterranean spirit of life. There is an attempt to maximise this heightened spirit in the summer months, and thus two periods in the rhythm of the local population are polarised: from maximum wear and tear on the space and the capacity to total lack of content and absence of people in the winter months. The simulation of life that Baudrillard explains in postmodern society comes to the fore again here. Villas with sea views, elegantly simplified and markedly conceptually finished Airbnb apartments that endeavour to put Mediterranean charm into their aesthetic simulate the life of Mediterranean Man, creating a stereotype along the depiction of Orientalism by Edward Said. Clearly visible in the organisation of the space of reality is the tendency of people to control the external, which refects our inner longings. Interiors and exteriors of houses dominate by manifesting human domination from the interior decoration by the addition of pot plants to the taming of nature, of the outer world of plants, the growth and spread of which in the space is strictly controlled. But as soon as this control relaxes, the powerful vegetation starts to create its own heterotopia, dominating people and space, growing unstoppable. In his artistic practice, Eškinja studies the relations of space and perception, actually the relation between us and the space by which we are surrounded. In the “Accidental Perspectives” installations he puts the focus of interest on the moments of the construction process in which the rawness of the materials is the most visible. He builds a picture of plasterboard, presenting it as fragment of wall on which he continues to apply plaster. As total contrast to the amorphous raw plaster a precise and mathematically exact, meticulously produced network of lines is written out. Creating form using optical illusions, the lines are on the border of interior and exterior enabling the observer to read of the work at several levels. The dark neutral colours of the background, the drywall, in brownish ochre and olive green, contribute to the impression of incompletion of the surroundings into which a systematic drawing of lines composed of glossy self-adhesive tape is introduced. In the drawing we discern the motif of curtain, transcendental motif embodying the symbol of an occupied house. Curtains represent a border, but again a controlled border between inner and outer world, for once again the human control of space and personal privacy comes to the fore: with a single movement it is possible to reveal or conceal one’s space, creating new relations between the worlds.

AXIS OF THE WORLD_THE TREE

9.3.2023. - 23.4.2023.

Curator: Petra Golušić

This exhibition comprises a selection of forty seven works from the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Dubrovnik Museum of Modern Art. Twenty-seven artists belong prevailingly to Modernism in foreign and in the national art, while contemporary expression is presented just minimally. What these works have in common is the motif of tree, which is brought in independently or in groups, mainly in works of pure landscape. It is also depicted in the foregrounds of seascapes and vistas; it is presented integrally, in sequences, as part of a forest, fragmentarily. Mostly featured at the exhibition is painting, but drawings, prints and photographs are also represented.
The substantial content is considered.

The period marked stretches from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century and takes in the work of the following artists: Vlaho Bukovac (1855 – 1922), Mato Celestin Medović (1857 – 1920), Josip Lalić (1867 – 1953), Nadežda Petrović (1873 – 1915), Marko Rašica (1883 – 1963), Gabrijel Jurkić (1886 – 1974), Oskar Herman (1886 – 1974), Ljubo Babić (1890 – 1974), Ignjat Job (1895 – 1936), Sava Šumanović (1896 – 1942), Milo Milunović (1897 – 1967), Hans Gassebner (1902 – 1966), Willy Hempel (1905 – 1985), Sergije Glumac (1903 – 1964), Slavko Šohaj (1908 – 2003), Ivan Ettore (1910 – 1938), Ante Kaštelančić (1911 – 1989), Josip Colonna (1911 – 2001), Gabro Rajčević (1912 – 1943), Jakša Magaš (1918 – 2012), Antun Masle (1919 – 1967), Đuro Pulitika (1922 – 2006), Joško Baica (1923 – 2010), Tomislav Ciko (1930 – 1982), Josip Trostmann (1938), Robert Farber (1944) and Damir Fabijanić (1955).

A speech manifested diversely and similarly is established.
Sensoriness is intellectual and intellectuality is sensory.

The tree is venerated in all cultures and times, and as a motif of art history is always present at various levels of meaning and interpretation. It is one of the richest and most widely disseminated symbolic themes connected to the idea of a vital universe in incessant renewal.
It is a symbol of life.
In its incessant development and its ascent to the sky it evokes the whole symbolism of uprightness.
It links three levels of the cosmos, brings together all the elements and is in general considered a symbol of the links that are established between earth and sky.
In terms of its strength and its perpendicularity it has a central character: the tree of the world or world-tree is another term for the axis of the world.
It marks and labels the return to the centre of being.

The universal zone is mapped with the sign process / aesthetic process.
Works of art give aesthetic information and communication.
Diversity is riches.
Particularity belongs to universality.

Thinking of the sensory is staged.
The subjective of sensoriness is objectified.
The visual turns into the spiritual.

The tree, symbol of nobility, is subjected to the drama of rape and destruction.

Mankind must have a serious understanding of his attitude to the wealth that surrounds him and which is essential for his continued existence.

MARA BRATOŠ _ THE TRUTH

20.7. _ 4.9.2022.

Concept: Mara Bratoš | Petra Golušić

Curator: Petra Golušić

FROM THE SELF-NUDES INF THE FORES CYCLE, 1995

Contemporary photographer Mara Bratoš has created cycles of nude portraits of herself: ‘Self-Nudes in the Forest‘ (1995), 'Self-Nudes’ (2005), 'Self-Nudes 2015’ (2015), 'Love and Life of a Woman’ (2017), 'Self-Portrait with Daughter’ (2021) and 'Pavla and Mara' (2022). The techniques vary from analogue to digital modes. The body photographed is shown as a whole or in parts, it is posed.

‘The body is known and absolutized.’ (Claude Cahun) Implicit in this point is the author's objectivization of individual content that is adduced in simplified manner.

FROM THE SELF-NUDES CYCLE, 2015

It is possible slowly and profoundly to follow the transformation of the posing of the female figure recorded with the subtle and refined aesthetic, the quality and sharpness of insight in the staged and directed scenes. The physicality seen through the lens placed opposite is the entry into the universe of beings that is presented. Various kinds of being are adduced. What is experienced, known, felt – that is what is presented. Perceiving the subject in self-presentation, it is described within a light that is masterfully recorded. Using the inductive method, the artist considers and registers the body that is being examined at several levels. The interior is revealed in such a way that the individual is staged ontologically. An objective territory is achieved that breaks down all borders of the private in ultimate disclosure.

The relation of body and the outer coordinates is directed with great refinement. The relation of surroundings to motif alters, and vice versa. Spatiality in the work of Mare Bratoš is a forest, a created stage with a floral pattern or is a descriptive background reduced to empty wall. The space in which the photography is done always has a symbolic meaning.

Aesthetic phenomena: the body and fragments of the body are a metaphysical landscape.

The work is steeped in the mystery.

Mental and physical existence are considered. It is possible to see the primordial necessity for self-re-examination, the full experiencing of life irrespective of how much weight or lightness is stored up within it. From girl to woman, mother; various movements are shown without the mask. The body is the utterance of the liberated spirit – of absolute freedom in its endless, unlimited liberation.

In the work of Mara Bratoš the body is - truth.

It is a reflection of pain, suffering, danger, existential insecurity, absence, the urge for self-preservation, the experience of crisis, unrest, trauma, drama, psychosis, the wounds of the world. It is a metaphor for the lived socio-cultural environment and the civilization in which it exists. At the same time, the nude stages authentic liberty, a testimony to mystery, safety, sacred emptiness, peace, harmony, sensuality, sensitivity, Platonic Eros, secret writing, mysticism, the limitlessness of the spirit.

Existential and ontological experiences are always at hand.

A specific subjectivity finds its way to the universal zone. A general art of portraiture is created.

An essential word tells of - the truth, irrespective of what it is like.

Truth is never a supertemporal being, ‘but what crucially affects human existence and makes it responsible’. One arrives at Heidegger’s understanding of art as the putting of truth to work, ascribing to artistic creativity an ontological function since for him that is one of the basic ways in which the sense of the being of being as a whole is revealed.

FROM THE LOVE AND LIFE OF A WOMAN CYCLE, 2017

BIOGRAPHY

Mara Bratoš was born in Dubrovnik in 1974. She went to elementary school in her native city, and to Cherry Hill High School West, Philadelphia, graduating in 1992. In the same year she enrolled in the Film and TV Camera Department at the Academy of Dramatic Art at Zagreb University, graduating in 1998. She worked for a number of magazines (Cosmopolitan, Globus, Elle, Klik) and from 1999 to 2015 was photography editor of the finance and business monthly Banka. From 2006 to 2014 she worked for the Zagreb Youth Theatre as photographer and documentalist; from 2014 she had the same position in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. She won the Best Young Artist Prize (Croatian Photography, 1995, Art Pavilion, Zagreb) and in 1999 the Panel of Judges of Croatian AICA Prize at the Zagreb Design and Applied Art Youth Salon, Croatian Artists’ Centre, Zagreb. She is a member of the artists associations ULUPUH, HZSU, HDFD and HDLU Dubrovnik. Her work has been discussed in print by Leonida Kovač, Sandra Križić Roban, Antun Maračić, Marija Tonković, Slaven Tolj, Goran Trbuljak, Višnja Slavica Gabaut and others. Since 1995, Mara Bratoš has had a continuous record of exhibiting, at many solo and collective shows at home and abroad. She lives and works in Zagreb.

FROM THE PAVLA AND MARA CYCLE, 2022

JOSIP IVANOVIĆ
CARLINGS, 2012 – 2022
Curator: Andrea Batinić Ivanković
Duration: 18.5.2022. – 3.7.2022.

CARLINGS, 2022.
acrylic on canvas
155 x 200 cm

It is in societies with prevailing modern production that life is presented as a huge accumulation of scenes. In that respect, Ivanović’s accumulation of toy car scenes that unify both time and space, become, and already are, a symbol of modern civilisation and the current theme of modern life. The central motif of art by the Dubrovnik-based painter Josip Ivanović is a car as a starting point for defining the modern world module.

CARLINGS, 2014.
combined technique on paper
36 x 92 cm

One of the first features of his handwriting is recognised by the cultivated graphic matrix, revealing an exceptional connoisseur of graphic procedure in the lucid permeation of métier skill and creative invention. By synthesizing matter and the spiritual, Ivanović creates his process on a solid graphic base in inventive mutations he "frames" thematic issues without emphasizing the environmental component, but creates his own discourse of distinctive artistic expressiveness.
(Milan Bešlić)

CARLINGS, 2014.
combined technique on paper
32 x 68 cm

The realistic, visual template of the toy cars in the painter's works sheds its realistic component and becomes one of the undefined, abstract forms that make up the painting. Abstracting objectivity in favour of the autonomy of line, shape, stain, and chromatic accent, Ivanović did not entirely renounce certain reference qualities, because while looking at his paintings, we cannot escape the impression that they are a kind of variation on the artist's understanding of painting.

CARLINGS, 2022.
acrylic on canvas
155 x 200 cm

L'ÉTOILE, 2020.
acrylic on canvas
155 x 200 cm

Non-figural and figural motifs are merged into a whole, as well as sections of evenly applied colour and clean lines. He places the same toy car motifs, which he shapes in different colours in many ways. Their positions are dislocated within the set frame, giving a strong impression of motion, of being in motion, but also the impossibility of culmination. .Ivanović's goal is not only to create pure abstract forms, but forms that motivate.

CARLINGS, 2018.
acrylic on canvas
155 x 200 cm

CARLINGS, 2017.
acrylic on canvas
155 x 200 cm

As he is a sculptor by vocation, for him, sculpture is a sign for syntactic, intra-artistic and abstract organisation of solid static objects. With a clear vision, he develops his embodied thought - through wooden toy car sculptures as well as their 3-D models, the artist speaks culturally coded language. He moves them out of the perspective space of two-dimensionality and introduces them to the third dimension.

CARLINGS, 2016. – 2022.
wood, colour
min 17,5x39,5x10cm – max 22x53,5 x 10cm (7x)

By combining materials, he created sculptural works in which wood and plastic coexist happily, each with its own morphological and artistic preferences - these are works whose forms clearly indicates the desired content and motif association, primarily focused on the world of everyday modern life.

CARLINGS, 2022.
wood, colour
min 17,5 x 39,5 x 10 cm - 22 x 40 x 13,3 cm (x6)

BIOGRAPHY
Josip Ivanović was born in Sarajevo in 1961. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo in 1988, after which he went to Dubrovnik. Through the career spanning more than three decades, he has been working in different fields and media, including sculpture in glass and metal, drawings, collages and graphics, paintings and reliefs, theatre scenography’s and public sculptures and monuments. He fought in the war in Croatia (1991 – 1995) after which he worked alongside French restorers and masons on different restoration projects of stone buildings in the Dubrovnik Old Town. He has had over fifty solo and group exhibitions in about forty cities all over the World and his fruitful oeuvre has been featured in numerous articles, and several radio and TV documentaries. He has been a member of the Croatian Association of Artists since 1988 and the Croatian Freelance Artists Association since 1993. He lives and works in Dubrovnik.

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IVANA PEGAN _ SOMEWHERE
4.12.2021. – 30.1.2022.
Curator: Petra Golušić

Multimedia artist Ivana Pegan is represented in this exhibition by books, video works, photographs, photographs with text or typewritten words, pictures that may or may not contain writing. The idiom is built up from the world of life and the world of language the aesthetics of which is founded on the dividing line of the key questions of fundamental areas, biography, fiction and live metaphors. Pegan deals with an analysis of the conditions of the perception of space and objects and its conceptual and linguistic interdependencies. She explores the cognitive and aesthetic effects that are diverse because of the material and metaphysically structural conditions. With theoretical, philosophical and linguistic debates, she opens up specific areas of artistic work, expression and presentation. She considers the self-knowledge of the subject, and cognition. She interprets life, both realistic and imaginary, with a softness of expression of acute perception and presents it in its refractions and in its light.

Books, particularly in the visual code, have the characteristics of zen – spontaneity, simplicity, calmness and loneliness. Photographs and textual contents theoretically problematise the given or the imagined surroundings, language and mental representation. A testimony is created about imagined events and about those that are not. Authentic quotations of individual lives are linked up with codes of public and private communication and with the magic of imagination. The dignity of existence is expressed. A space that is ontologically legible is created.

BOOK # 3, 2018
21 x 15 x 1 cm
detail

In a series of photographic diptychs, which she directs with just a word or two, the author opens up the key issues related to the human being.

ONCE UPON A TIME, 2019
fine art print, typewritten characters – letters
21 x 15 cm (2 x)

The artist during her isolation in the time of the COVID-19 plague in these regions of the world created works in watercolour and gouache. The link of writing|painting the word and the picture field took place. The interpictorial and the intertextual are explored. Text is a narrative framework for the understanding of the image and in general in the work of this artist there is a philosophical relationship established between it and the visual account.
Somewhere is one of the works made up of eight images some of which also have words in them. The first part says if there is and the second no. The possibility is opened up for the existence of the real world while in the next part of the artwork there is direct consideration of the lack of existence of any such thing. After that come three abstract images that signify the limitlessness in the human, and two pieces of writing: we will and meet. The existence of the territory of encounter is announced, territory that is cancelled out as phenomenal world and is not of a material nature. This is a story of human being and the necessity of the human for the destined other. It is about the creation of an area that excludes reality and stands for zones in which spiritual expanses are the only possible place of encounter that are set us from the absolute being|absolute spirit and are necessary for continued existence. /…/ The cycle is represented by a denuded, liberated and empty landscape adduced at various levels as truth and eternal existence. It cannot be done away with or cancelled out even in the hardest|darkest periods of an individual and the world, periods in which it is simply necessary to survive.

SOMEWHERE, 2020
watercolor, gouache, paper
65 x 50 cm (7 x)
detail

UNTITLED, 2020
watercolor, gouache, paper
65 x 50 cm

What is going on in the work of Ivana Pegan? There is an incessant and subtle wish to arrive at the truth about the being of the world and of life, at the pith and marrow of the human being. Clearly stated is the human drive for knowledge of the transcendence, unchangeable and truthful being of everything that exists. Adduced are the dark and the light of being. Presence is analysed. Time is annulled. The perception of life in its ordinariness and quiet magnificence is mapped in simplified terms. With philosophical profundity the interior and the exterior zones which we both create and have assigned to us are connected. The imaginary is opened up. The essence of the freedom of the spirit is marked. The pure place is encoded.

MOOD, 2017
ink, paper
50 x 65 cm (3 x)

BIOGRAPHY
Ivana Pegan was born in 1971 in Doboj. She took her degree in 1996 from the sculpture section of the Academy of Fine Arts of Zagreb University, class of Šime Vulas. In her work the artist explores and starts up various discourses through the means of audio works, video works, artist’s books, diary|books – works, photographs, installations and other things. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Independent Artists, Lazareti Art Workshop in Dubrovnik, the art organisation Tkivo and Dubrovnik Art Forum. She is the manager of the Flora Gallery of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists Dubrovnik and also works with restoration. She has exhibited at many solo and collective exhibitions and other events at home and abroad. She lives and works in Dubrovnik.

- - - - -

DENIS KRAŠKOVIČ

MAN ANIMAL PLANT
Curator: Rozana Vojvoda
Duration: 02.10. – 28.11. 2021.

The exhibition by contemporary Croatian artist Denis Kraškovič “Man Animal Plant” covers, in terms of theme, almost all the pieces presented, from the earliest of the mid-nineties to recent works done last years. It is suggestive of the broad vision, the aspiration to cover the whole, the artist’s interest in the intertwining of the manifestations of life on the planet that is their common home.

denis kraškovič

Denis Kraškovič, Man Animal Plant, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 400 cm

Denis Kraškovič, an academy-trained sculptor, through a speciously simple expression, captures complex themes, and equally intensely and passionately uses a whole range of media of artistic expression. Apart from sculptures and sculptural groups, the exhibition also shows paintings, drawings and video works.

denis kraškovič

Denis Kraškovič, A Blue Envelope, 2018., acrylic on canvas, 80 x 120 cm

Kraškovič’s emblematic motif, the trademark of his work in sculpture, consists of animals, in the depictions of which he very seldom departs from the mimetic principle; he insists they be identifiable, with the addition of vigorous and always solid colour.

Denis Kraškovič, Close to the End, 2018, coloured epoxy resin, height: 80 cm, photo: Miho Skvrce

Denis Kraškovič, St. Francis talking to animals, 2010., coloured polyester, height: 140 cm, photo: Miho Skvrce

Another important feature of this artist’s creative work, apart from his continuous fascination with animals and the environment is self-referentiality, particularly visible in the paintings, dominated by strong, solid colours, flatness in the composition and comic-strip aesthetics.

Denis Kraškovič, Oh My Robot, if Only You and Me Could Be This Free, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 80 cm

The oeuvre of drawings of Denis Kraškovič has in it something of the diary entry, of meditational reading, it is multifarious and diverse in charge, technique and manner, the only thing running through the drawings in common is an impassioned and continuous celebration
of life.

La Dolce Vita, 2014., felt pen on paper, 30 x 21 cm

Man and the Forces of Nature, 1993, felt pen on paper, 30 x 21 cm

Denis Kraškovič genuinely, more than all other artists who came to maturity in the Croatian art scene in the mid-nineties, through a simple idiom combines very various areas – including in a specific manner both a religious and a spiritual component, plays with references to comic strips, SF films, music, delves deeply into questions of identity and at the same time takes up burning issues like concern for the environment and the extinction of plant and animal species.

Save the Threatened Mushroom, 2006., painted polyester, 600 x 600 x 50 cm

BIOGRAPHY

Denis Krašković was born in 1972 in Zagreb, where he graduated from the secondary School for Applied Art and Design. In 1994 he took his degree at the sculptural section of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, class of Stanko Jančić. In 2011 he completed a master’s degree in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, supervised by Jože Barši. He started his work in education at the School of Applied Art and Design in Zagreb teaching in the sculpture department from 1996 to 2007. From 2007 to 2017 he was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Osijek (assistant professor and since 2013 an associate professor).

In 2015 and 2016 he was a visiting professor at the sculpture department of the Academy for Music and Visual Art in Pecs. He has exhibited in many solo and collective shows in Croatia and abroad. He is the author of sixteen public sculptures, the best known of which are Whale at Jarun Lake, Zagreb; Walrus and Lamb in front of Arena Zagreb; two monumental sculptures, Neanderthal in Krapina and Mediterranean Monk Seal and Pup in Šibenik. He lives and works as a freelance artist in Zagreb.

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EUGEN VARZIĆ

ALL YOUR PAINTINGS ARE OK
Curator: Vinicije B. Lupis
Curator coordinator: Andrea Batinić Ivanković
Duration: 22.7.2021. – 19.9.2021.

MERJEMA, 2020.
oil on canvas
150 x 200 cm

Painter Eugen Varzić in the exhibition “All your paintings are OK” introduces himself with the artwork created in the period from 2016-2021. These are paintings created in oil on canvas technique and drawings in pencil on paper technique. Artist’s wife Romana and their children and acquaintances, are being permanent models transformed into the new imaginary worlds-portraits. With such a marvellous art technique on which many are envious, painter Varzić with the completeness of his portraits has set new canons of postmodern iconography.

FUTURE, 2020.
oil on canvas
120 x 100 cm

The painter Eugen Varzić is a particular personality in the Croatian art scene for he has directed his growth in visual art, the path of his artistic research, in a different direction. We are dealing here with the building of the visual art of a contemporary Croatian painter on the heritage of the current visual trends of American painting of the 20th century. Here we are not talking about illusion, the magical need for the reproduction of reality, but of giving new meanings to the persons and objects that surround us in everyday life. (Vinicije B. Lupis)

BELLA, CIAO, 2021.
oil on canvas
200 x 130 cm

The series of portraits of his own family, of acquaintances, suggests a lasting interest in the process of examining private life, for in conversation with the model, the artist can shape a creative interrelationship. Painting is in fact Varzić’s diary, a constant fight with the whiteness of the canvas and a search for new challenges. He has thus opened a new chapter of Croatian contemporary painting, in a completely separate direction. With his independent development, inherent in himself, he took it off into the course of American art, and is surrounded by friends, absorbing the best of European experience, achieved a painterly technique worthy of the Old Masters. (Vinicije B. Lupis)

YOHANAN HA'MATBIL, 2021.
oil on canvas
200 x 180 cm

Landscape in Eugen Varzic’ painting is not just recording and transformation more or less picturesque motifs of nature, but also the theme through which he expresses his thoughts and moods. It is the sum of facts and questions; immediate experience and reflection of the accumulated experience. The artist has created coherent system of intimate landscapes or dynamic sights; hence Eugen's realism is immersion in the mystery of nature, a new creation, and this can only be attained only by the painter of top artistry, sensitive to all those harmonies in the inconceivable whimsy of changeable nature. (Andrea Batinić Ivanković)

BABINA GREDA, 2016/2017.
oil on canvas
140 x 120 cm

LIFE, 2020/2021.
Oil on canvas
150 x 70 cm

BIOGRAPHY
Eugen Varzić graduated from the painting department of the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka in 1999. He has shown his work at some thirty solo exhibitions and at more than a hundred collective reviews at home and abroad. He did further studies in art in Madrid, in the workshop of Eloy Morales and Antonio López Garcia. His artworks are to be found in many private and public spaces and in private collections in Croatia and worldwide, as well as in religious premises. He is the author of two public sculptures done in mosaic, Three Seater and Confine, erected in Poreč, and the mural Marino Cetina in Umag. For a number of years he has taken part in benefit auctions of paintings. Occasionally he engages in design, short films, illustration and picture book making, running art workshops ant tutoring future students of art academies. A freelance artist, he lives and works in Istria, Croatia.

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NIKOLINA ŠIMUNOVIĆ
LAPIS LAZULI

Curator: Anita Ruso
Curator coordinator: Andrea Batinić Ivanković
Duration: 27.5.2021. – 18.7.2021.

In the “Lapis lazuli“ exhibition, Nikolina Šimunović presents herself with recent artwork and several earlier works through media of painting, sculpture, mobile, and installation. All works of art are born out of current social circumstances and connected to the historical influences of the day. Sometimes they reflect the turbulent or golden times around the artist, and sometimes the inner world of their own creator. (Anita Ruso)

Ninolina Šimunović

SPACES OF THE TIME, 2019.
mixed media on canvas
200 x 450 cm

On the surface of her canvas, (450 cm x 430 cm) an array of different compositions rises up. Made up of miniature drawings, tracing paper, see-through organdy, tulle woven with thread and wool that binds all these different materials into a perfect union that merges in the depth of her blue. All the might of the color blue that Nikolina use sin her works of art i san unconscious side effect along with active manifestation of oceanic and sky-like surfaces. (Anita Ruso)

I OWE YOU THAT YOU DISCOVER ME - DIPTYCH, 2021.
mixed media on canvas
70 x 140 cm

The author does not deal here primarily with the structure of an individual form, but with the kind of spacial organization reduced to the relations of colour and structure, elements that bear the primarily features of the sculptural process and the expressiveness of the painter's style. By interesting framing, Simunovic creates dynamic spatial compositions, emphasizing, balancing and harmonizing them by her tactile movement. By activating surface this way, she introduces new dimension – dimension of three-dimensionality. (Andrea Batinić Ivanković)

I SEE EVERYTHING, 2021.
glass
30,8 x 35 x 12,5 cm

The airy, branched structure of epoxy resin mobile is designed as a unique spatial installation that is just a mission of the sky blue revealing the whole spectrum of sensations to an observer. This is an artwork in which, under the artist's hand, a perfect balance between the linear structure and the painted, clear surfaces is accomplished. Along with the spatial installation of the mobile, there are mirrors that achieve special aura of ethereal atmosphere by reflecting light, although their basic effect is actually autonomous, deeply plastic and mostly of very small dimensions. (Andrea Batinić Ivanković)

EVERYTHING LEADS BACK TO MYSELF, 2021.
mixed media / mobile
150 x 100 x 200 cm

EVERYTHING LEADS BACK TO MYSELF, 2021.
mixed media / mobile
150 x 100 x 200 cm
detail

BIOGRAPHY

Nikolina Šimunović was born on September 9th, 1978 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. She graduated from Luka Sorkočević Art School of Dubrovnik (secondary education) in 1997 majoring in fine art and design. She went on to study art at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb where she graduated in the class of 2003. She has been a member of the Croatian Association of Artists since 2004. In addition to painting, she has also been using a number other art forms, techniques, and media, applying them in illustrations, interior design and constructing various objects (such as sculptures, furniture, lighting fixtures etc.). Since 2005, she has been working as an art teacher at the grof Janko Drašković elementary school in Zagreb. In 2006, she started working as an expert associate at Sirius, center for psyhhological counselling, educational training and research. Her works can be found in private collections all over the world, as well as in various museums in Croatia.

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AN INSIGHT INTO THE MOVEMENTS - artworks from the MOMAD collection
Duration: March 3, 2021 - May 2021
Curators: Rozana Vojvoda & Petra Golušić & Jelena Tamindžija

Exhibition from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik presents a selection from the gallery’s collection that today counts over 2,700 works of art, covering the period from the late 19th century to the present. The three floors of the Villa Banac, one of the most beautiful buildings of Croatian modern architecture, are packed with works of art that include reflections of Impressionism, Expressionistic and Coloristic tendencies, abstract expression of the organic and geometric type of the fifties and sixties, postmodern painting tendencies of the eighties and art of expanded media that includes photography, video, and performing arts.

ARTISTS:
1st floor:
Robert Farber, Jan Fabre, Steve McCurry, Slaven Tolj, Božidar Jurjević, Pasko Burđelez, Dubravka Lošić, Katarina Ivanišin Kardum, Ivana Pegan Baće, Ana Opalić, Marko Ercegović, Mara Bratoš, Ivona Vlašić, Ivana Dražić Selmani, Tina Gverović, Ivan Skvrce, Ivona Šimunović
2nd floor:
Oton Gliha, Frano Šimunović, Albert Kinert, Ivo Šebalj, Zlatko Prica, Edo Murtić, Vatroslav Kuliš, Vojin Bakić, Dušan Džamonja, Lukša Peko, Marojica Mitrović, Josip Škerlj, Milovan Stanić, Krsto Hegedušić, Ferdinand Kulmer, Jadranka Fatur, Vlado Jakelić
3rd floor:
Ignjat Job, Ivan Ettore, Gabro Rajčević, Ivo Dulčić, Antun Masle, Đuro Pulitika, Ivo Vojvodić, Josip Trostmann, Viktor Šerbu, Tomislav Gusić, Niko Miljan, Marko Rašica, Marko Murat, Emanuel Vidovića, Marino Tartaglia, Menci Klement Crnčić, Miroslav Kraljević, Vladimir Becić, Vilko Gecan, Milivoj Uzelac, Vladimir Babić, Vlaho Bukovac, Mato Celestin Medović, Josip Colonna

KATARINA ALAMAT KUSIJANOVIĆ
MENSURA
Duration: December 17, 2020 - February 28th, 2021
Curator: Petra Golušić

In an arch in the Sponza Palace, there is a Latin elegiac couplet:
Fallere nostra vetant et falli pondera meqve
Pondero cvm merces, ponderat ipse Devs
Our weights will not permit us to deceive or be deceived,
While I weigh the goods, God himself is weighing me.

Katarina Alamat Kusijanović uses these lines in a series of works and writes them out, cut up, i.e., fragmented, in works done in chalk on panel and in acrylic on Perspex. She reveals it in full only in two places, in the exhibition entitled Mensura, that is, measure.
Conditions for a perceptual failure to recognise the textual message are created, and this message becomes the starting point for and central motif of the works in which various universal problem areas of humanity, contemporary society, cities and places of the world, morality, freedom, truth are considered.
The modules are regularly and simply set up as frames of a polysemic saying interpreted disjointedly. It is at once endorsed and the reality is indicated in which the cancellation of its meaning, essence and existence unfolds.
Dubrovnik is the point of departure from which the motif is borrowed, so as to be able to use it to label and understand the condition of darkness and corruption of the spirit to which it has been brought, as have other cities in the world.
There is no noise and no strained emotion in the work of Alamat Kusijanović. It is simply and clearly critical without being condemnatory. What is presented is the ethical and cosmological vision that has come down from the inherited cultural heritage of the surroundings. The commercial policy of the Dubrovnik Republic had its own inscription that warned the measurers to be careful not to make mistakes, which is today particularly needful in all spheres of human work and activity. Commerce is today a mainly sullied space where horrors take place and the victim is human. Naturally there are scales that do not cheat and that in their calling are guided by the cause and point of everything that exists. Dubrovnik is made the subject, as a common place of the world, which suffers contemporary errors and which should be directed to correctness in order to justify all the qualities that were created in the past and that are suppressed in the present.
The universality of the work of the human being rests and is founded upon a renunciation of the self in the sense of surrender to the eternal which alone is truthful. Internal presence is demanding and is the basic task of every person; it is the possibility of being in truth, freedom, peace, purity… The measures are distorted at every level, it is concluded quietly and acutely and with great refinement in the works of Alamat Kusijanović.
The exhibition tells us of the collapse of the world and optimistically encodes the territory of the immortal.

MENSURA # 1, 2016
kreda, zlato, drvo, pleksiglas / chalk, gold, wood, plexiglass
53 x 53 x 11 cm

BIOGRAPHY
Katarina Alamat Kusijanović was born in Dubrovnik in 1965. She took a degree at the Education College in Belgrade, 1989, in the easel painting restoration and conservation section, and then in the Art Academy in Split in 2004. She has been a member of HDLU, the Croatian Artists Association, since 1992. From 1993 to 2019 she was employed as conservation/restoration adviser in the Croatian Conservation Institute and from 2008 to 2014 she was manager of the Dubrovnik Restoration Department. As staff member of the Croatian Conservation Institute she gave a series of lectures in professional and scholarly conferences at home and abroad. She has published two scholarly and a number of specialised works. She was the author of the exhibition installation Hidden Trecento (in front of the Rector’s Palace in Dubrovnik in 2018) and of the exhibition The Altar Painting of Jacopo Tintoretto from the Cathedral in Korčula (Rector’s Palace, Dubrovnik, 2008). Since 2008 she has worked as designer in the Adriatic Luxury Hotels group. She has exhibited at many solo and collective exhibitions. Katarina Alamat Kusijanović lives and works in Dubrovnik.

REFLEXIO CAERULEA # 2, 2020
akrilik, pleksiglas / acrylic, plexiglass
30 x 30 x 4 cm (48 x)

LOVRO ARTUKOVIĆ
DECELERATION
Duration: December 10, 2020 – February 28th, 2021
Organizers: The Art Pavilion in Zagreb and Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik
In association with the Modern Gallery, Zagreb
Expert conception, selection of works, catalogue essay: Leonida Kovač
Curator in Dubrovnik: Jelena Tamindžija

Biće iz bajke-kubističko, 2018., foto Gunter Lepkowski

The Art Pavilion in Zagreb and Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik are the joint organizers of the exhibition Deceleration in which, after many years, Lovro Artuković is presenting himself in Zagreb.

The exhibition should have been held in Zagreb in the Art Pavilion from mid-July to mid-September 2020, in the general framework of the cycle Ambiental Exhibitions of Contemporary Croatian Artists for the Art Pavilion. In the meantime, Zagreb was hit by the earthquake, which inflicted great damage on the Art Pavilion, because of which the gallery is closed until further notice. Therefore the exhibition is now on display in Zagreb at the Modern Gallery, for which we are most grateful to its director, Branko Franceschi.

Lovro Artuković has lived for years in Berlin, and had his last show in Zagreb in 2014 in Lauba. Since then in Zagreb, his native town, we have not had the chance to see works by this artist.

Artuković’s primary medium is figurative painting. In the creation of his works he uses the traditional technique of oil paint on large format canvases. This exhibition, too, includes large-sized paintings, but there are some new elements as well, related to the artist’s explorations in visual art. This has resulted in the great richness of detail in his recent works. The exhibition in Zagreb, and subsequently in Dubrovnik, is presenting 43 works created in the period from 2015 to 2020, and is divided into four sections: Golden Foils and Reflections; The Melancholy of Night Lights; Visit to the Studio; Excursion.

From the list of Artuković’s solo shows it can be seen that the painter exhibits but seldom and that his creative process is very lengthy, the works ultimately coming into being over a rather long period of time. Certainly, this artist cannot be accused of hyper-production, and he says of himself, quite to the contrary: “Big production is something that is completely unknown to me, I cannot create in that way”.

Haljina na cvjetove, 2019., foto Gunter Lepkowski

Lovro Artuković says about the title of the exhibition Slowing Down and also about his recent work:

“In the last few years I’ve been living in an incessant internal struggle. The fact is that my paintings, or the things I want to achieve with them, are taking up more and more time. I think one doesn’t need to find the reason in my getting older and generally slowing down, rather in the multiplication of details in the paintings, while the manner in which I paint – the countless applications of transparent paint in a single place so that I can obtain the presence and the density of what is painted that I want – takes hours and hours that just slip by imperceptibly. Seated for days in front of the same painting, enslaved to just a single detail, I often think that I ought to speed my painting procedure up, be more productive, work in key with the age in which everything unfolds at a frenzied speed, an age in which, I’m afraid, nobody anyway is going to have the patience or the concentration to engage in looking at my pictures with a slow, old-fashioned kind of pleasure.

Actually, I have got myself into this trap, as it sometimes seems to me. I have permitted the circumstances of life, and not some plan or system, to guide me in the choice of subjects, But when I look at what I have painted, I see that it had to be painted in just that way. For the sake of energy, of the atmosphere, for the sake of everything that I wanted, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve with each of these paintings. Since I haven’t (yet) invented a patent to permit me to paint simply and rapidly, while also being content with what is painted, at the end I always humbly acknowledge this slow and painful manner, even if it sometimes frustrates me, as my personal and identifiable manner. And so I decided to exhibit the paintings done in the last few years under the title Slowing Down.”

BIOGRAPHY

Lovro Artuković was born in 1959 in Zagreb, Croatia, and took his art degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city. He has developed his painterly idiom, which is based on figuration and intimism, primarily on the iconography of urban civilisation. For some years he worked as a teacher at the Applied Art and Design School in Zagreb, subsequently, for nine years, being employed as assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 2003, he moved to Berlin, where he makes his living as a freelance artist. He has had numerous one-man shows. He had his first solo exhibition in 1985 in the Vladimir Nazor Gallery. In 2008 he had a retrospective in Klovićevi dvori Gallery, entitled Best Paintings, which encompassed works done between 1984 and 2008. This exhibition was accompanied by an extensive catalogue of his works also entitled Best Paintings authored by Blaženka Perica (Klovićevi dvori Gallery, Zagreb, 2008). In 2001 he received the Annual Prize of the Croatian Artists Association, and in 2013 the Prize of the Public at the exhibition Macht Kunst, in the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle.

Several distinguished art historians and critics have written of Artuković’s oeuvre, including Krešimir Purgar, Feđa Vukić, Leonida Kovač and Blaženka Perica . Two films have been made about it: the experimental film Theft directed by Lukas Nola of 2004, and the documentary L.A. Unfinished by Igor Mirković of 2008. His works are to be found in numerous public and private collections at home and abroad.

Ukazanje u Neukollnu (crveno, žuto, zeleno), 2020., foto Gunter Lepkowski