Month: November 2021

Lidija Šeler, Cries and Whispers

In line with “Twomblyesque” poetics, Lidija Šeler creates her own “cries and whispers” and in these almost monochromatic canvases that truly exude Bergmanian film atmosphere as a source of inspiration, she takes us much further, into the world of personal emotions, her own commitment to painting and ultimately the world where man is an inextricable part of nature. ...writes art historian Romina Peritz in the foreword to the catalogue of Lidija Šeler’s exhibition titled Cries and Whispers. The public will be able to view the exhibition of this contemporary Croatian artist in the Josip Račić Gallery from 7 December 2021 to 9 January 2022. The artist found inspiration for the three works on display, two diptychs and a triptych of monumental dimensions, in the psychological drama Cries and Whispers, 1972 by the famous Swedish director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman. Thus, black, white and red that predominate on the canvases simultaneously represent an hommage of sorts to the set and costume design from the film, but also the white morning, red twilight or black winter evening observed through the glass walls of the artist’s studio…

Photo from the Cries and Whispers exhibition set-up Goran Vranić©National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Ivan Generalić, Washerwoman, 1936


Ivan Generalić
Washerwoman, 1936
oil on glass; 29 x 33 cm
MG-2158

The colour palette, typology and motif of Ivan Generalić’s Washerwoman is typical for the early Naïve art of Hlebine. During the 1930s, at the encouragement of Krsto Hegedušić, self-taught artists from the Podravina village of Hlebine painted and drew scenes from everyday life, so the ‘Washerwoman” is characterized by clear drawing, flat composition and pronounced symbolic local colours. The disproportionate figure is devoid of personal features, and the location specifies the characteristic ambience with Podravina houses and coral willow canopies.
Starting with readily available pencils and watercolours, the Hlebine painters-peasants later also painted in tempera and oil. Raised in the tradition of buying mostly religious paintings on glass (glaži), which have long been sold in villages of the Podravina region by Austrian and Slovenian itinerant painters, the Hlebine painters, besides paper and canvas, often also painted on glass, an easily available material of fascinating lustre. In 1930 in Hlebine, Krsto Hegedušić recognized and started to encourage Ivan Generalić’s fascinating innate talent. From 1931, Generalić started to exhibit as a guest artist in exhibitions of the Association Zemlja. He initially critically painted images of village life in watercolours, and later often in oil and tempera on glass. After World War II he became the central figure of the so-called Hlebine Peasant Art School, and his rural scenes approached lyrical idealization, metaphor and phantasy. In the 1970s, he devoted himself to symbolic and existential themes. He received international acclaim and held around seventy solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić©National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb,
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić©National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

The exhibition Glory: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith was presented at the press conference in the National Museum of Modern Art

 

   

The exhibition Glory: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith was presented at the press conference held on 25 November in the National Museum of Modern Art.
Branko Franceschi, director of the NMMU, author and curator of the exhibition spoke about the renowned American artists and her work, as well as the exhibition concept.

   

Gloria: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith
Curated by Branko Franceschi
November 2022 – 28 January 2022

The Croatian public have the first-ever opportunity to view, in their national museum institutions, works by the internationally renowned American artist Kiki Smith. Thanks to inventive and unencumbered technical procedures Smith has promoted through her multidisciplinary practice since the 1980s, she managed to singlehandedly change the canons in which human body and corporeality in general were traditionally presented. This is especially true of the motif of a woman and what has generally been considered the field of female creativity in art, such as motifs related to dreams, dream visions, the magical, conjuring and intuitive relationship towards reality, and nature in particular. Kiki Smith’s works are presented alongside the works of Croatian female artists from the NMMU collection, created over a period of one hundred years, which we find resonant and congruous with Kiki Smith’s work. It is an exhibition set-up that connects two art scenes and cultures, USA and Croatia, in time and space. The well-known Croatian female artists will introduce this international art star practically unknown in Croatia outside the art scene, to the local public and cultural discourse. In addition to the NMMU in Zagreb, the exhibition will also be showcased in the Museum of Fine Arts in Split (11 February 2022 – 27 March 2022), and each museum will present works of Croatian female artists from their respective collections. The exhibition catalogue will accompany both set-ups, the distribution of which will enable foreign audiences, who are drawn to Kiki Smith’s charisma, to get to know the century of prolific work of Croatian female artists. It is a beautiful position of solidarity and sisterhood by vocation that transcends existing global structure of power and fame relations. 

Croatian artists in exhibition set-up (alphabetically): Nevenka Arbanas, Biserka Baretić, Jagoda Buić, Vlasta Delimar, Ina Drutter, Marta Ehrlich, Ksenija Kantoci, Nives Kavurić Kurtović, Milena Lah, Sofija Naletilić Penavuša, Vesna Popržan, Slava Raškaj, Nasta Rojc, Edita Schubert

Biography of the artist

Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve the body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing and textiles. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms and the human nervous system as well as by using unusual materials. Her later practice includes animal motifs, domestic objects and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of her installations and sculptures, the frequent topos of which are themes of gender with an emphasis on the construction of archetypal female types and situations. Her interpretation of motifs along with cultural references is inspired with the oneiric dimension of reality.

Kiki Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including over 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Previously, Smith was recognized in 2006 by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: People Who Shape Our World”. Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.

 

 

Kiki Smith je širom svijeta organizirala brojne samostalne izložbe širom svijeta, uključujući preko 25 muzejskih izložbi. Njezin je rad predstavljen na pet venecijanskih bijenala, uključujući izdanje 2017. godine. Članica je Američke akademije za umjetnost i riječ i Američke akademije za umjetnost i znanost, a 2017. Kraljevska akademija umjetnosti u Londonu dodijelila joj je titulu počasnog kraljevskog akademika. Prije toga, Smith je 2006. godine od strane časopisa TIME prepoznata kao jedan od “TIME 100: Ljudi koji oblikuju naš svijet”. Ostale nagrade uključuju Skowheganovu medalju za kiparstvo 2000. godine; medalju Edwarda MacDowella iz 2009. godine; nagradu Nelson A. Rockefeller za 2010., medalju američkog Ministarstva vanjskih poslova za umjetnost iz 2013. godine, koju joj je dodijelila Hillary Clinton; i nagradu za životno djelo iz 2016. godine, koju je među ostalim dodijelio Međunarodni kiparski centar. Predaje na NYU i Sveučilištu Columbia.

Foto: iz postava izložbe Hrvatske umjetnice Slava: Hrvatske umjetnice pozdravljaju  Kiki Smith u NMMU. Goran Vranić©Nacionalni muzej moderne umjetnosti, Zagreb

Vladimir Varlaj, Red House, 1923

Vladimir Varlaj
Red House, 1923
oil on canvas
74 x 62.5 cm
MG-7098

Vladimir Varlaj’s best-known painting, the Red House from 1923, is actually an emphatically expressionist exception in his oeuvre. The railway station in Moravice stands out from the reality of Gorski Kotar as a disturbing fantasy, achieved with deformations of form and space along the shortened diagonal, intense non-mimetic colours and the juxtaposition of light and dark. Otherwise, the spirit of the poetics of Magic Realism and an affective tension of the Red House, connect Varlaj with the informal group of the Prague Four and the expressionist tendencies of Uzelac, Gecan and Trepše.

Vladimir Varlaj started his art training in Zagreb with Professor Tomislav Kizman, and he graduated from the College of Arts and Crafts under the tutelage of Menci Clement Crnčić. He returned from the Eastern Front disabled by war in 1917, and the following year he went to visit his friend Milivoj Uzelac in Prague. There is not a single extant painting of Varlaj from the period preceding his first appearance at the 1919 Spring Salon in Zagreb. From 1921 to 1927, besides the Spring Salons, he also regularly participated in exhibitions of the Group of Independent Artists founded by Ljubo Babić. Varlaj’s anthological series of landscapes and vedutas with a pronounced plasticity and exceptional suggestiveness was interrupted by serious illness in 1934. The still lifes he painted later seemed to be his way of bidding goodbye both to painting and life. He died in 1962 without having had a single solo exhibition.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, senior curator of the National Museum of  Modern Art © National Museum of  Modern Art Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Gortan Vranić© National Museum of  Modern Art Zagreb

Aleksandra Popović, Subtile & Subtle
4.11. – 5.12. 2021

Aleksandra Popović, Subtile & Subtle
4.11. - 28.11.2021.

About the subtile and the subtle: The painting of Aleksandra Popovic
If we were to reduce everything that makes up the visible world, and is not man-made, to two elements which, according to our scientific knowledge, represent the beginning of planet Earth’s formation and from which those myths with a known “creator mundi” originate. What remains is only water (“the primordial sea”) and – necessarily – the rocks that form the Earth; specifically, that which is rigid, solid, seemingly immutable, although it may disintegrate under the influence of water, change shape, crumble and be blown away; and that which is soft, fluid, constantly changing in its appearance, but which can also release a vast amount of energy when it starts to move or even when it crashes into an obstacle.
Both can be experienced in a tactile manner, and thus haptically, so it is no coincidence that Aleksandra Popović started her artistic career by modelling sculptures. But, in pursuit of her talent she soon turned towards painting, in other words: towards light without which we cannot see anything. Along with water and rock, it is the third element she devoted herself to. And it is one special light.
When she paints mountains, they are not lovely green hills fading in the blue distance, but fissured rocks of high mountains, wrapped in frozen water – pure ice, shimmering snow and glistening glaciers. When she paints water, paintings are not “seascapes” wherein our gaze is directed and rests on the horizon line, but an optical network of water, rocks, algae and lichen that sunlight sets into dizzying motion and turns in our imagination into siren song. It seems that light in Aleksandra Popović’s paintings never emanates from a source outside their subject-matter, but it lives within it, it shines from within without shadows. And since it is only colour that her paintings consist of, light and colour merge into one.
We have all found ourselves, at one time or another, at the water’s edge and surrendered to this game of elements. We like to turn such impressions of nature into metaphors in order to make them clearer mentally and understandable linguistically. But elements do not “play a game”, sunlight does not “dance”, and the gurgling of water or rhythm of the waves “does not speak”. It may not come easily to us, but when we separate ourselves from everything we already know, everything we have read and heard, then we see nothing but colours in nature. They are the quintessence of painting.
Its greatest challenge, however, has always been to capture the intangible, which allows us to see colours at all: light. It was only photography, wherein light itself crates the image, that managed to achieve this. And just as painters have been using photography for 170 years, Popović is also using it to capture her own motifs at a particular moment in time. Because neither mountains nor the sea can be painted with oil paints on an easel in plein air. It is only in the studio that these motifs are aesthetically arranged on the canvas in such a way that they create an image that transcends reality, which light alone could never have created.
The prevailing view since Romanticism has been that nature can reflect our moods because it is an antithesis to culture. This dialectic concept of art and nature was the basis for the rise of painting, which began with mood Impressionism in the 19th century and ended with 20th century Abstract Expressionism. Since then, painting has been pronounced dead several times, but without consequences. Nowadays, we understand human culture, including its devastating consequences, less as an antithesis of nature and more as a way to deal with it. Nature is no longer the other, in need of conquering, it is not harmonious or wild, it is simply what it is even without us, but it is something we cannot escape because we need it. Man’s struggle against nature has been replaced by his struggle for nature.
The art of painting and sculpture cannot escape from nature, unlike drawing – there are no lines in nature, only colours and forms, and both are the foundation of our elementary sensory experiences. Aleksandra Popović has the ability to dissolve forms – that we were taught the world is constructed of – into colours, and thus make a new experience from that world of colours. With great enthusiasm and perseverance, she strives for perfection, with only a few role models to follow, such as Thomas Ender, Paul Cezanne or Gerhard Richter. Aleksandra Popović’s paintings, rendered with many layers of oil paint over a prolonged period of time, are subtile and subtle. Photographs of the same pictorial objects would question our gaze, displace, so to speak, the image, in order to evoke it. The painting of Aleksandra Popović, on the other hand, requires from us a gaze that plunges into the painting – if we want to get through to the wellspring of the image: water, light, life.

Peter Zawrel

Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Aleksandra Popović, Collision, 2021, oil on canvas, 141 x 191 cm
Aleksandra Popović, The Beginning, 2021, oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm
Aleksandra Popović, Emergence, 2021, oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art

Gloria: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith

Gloria: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith
25 November 2021 – 28 January 2022

Exhibition concept: Branko Franceschi
Curator: Branko Franceschi

The Croatian public will have the first-ever opportunity to view, in their national museum institutions, twenty-one works by the internationally renowned American artist Kiki Smith. Thanks to inventive and unencumbered technical procedures Smith has promoted through her multidisciplinary practice during the 1980s, she managed to singlehandedly change the canons in which human body and corporeality in general were traditionally presented. This is especially true of the motif of a woman and what has generally been considered the field of female creativity in art, such as motifs related to dreams, dream visions, the magical, conjuring and intuitive relationship towards reality, and nature in particular. Kiki Smith’s works at the NMMU are presented alongside the works of fourteen Croatian female artists from the museum collection, created over a period of one hundred years, which we find resonant and congruous with Kiki Smith’s work. It is an exhibition set-up that connects two art scenes and cultures, USA and Croatia, in time and space. The well-known Croatian female artists will introduce this international art star, practically unknown in Croatia outside the art scene, to the local public and cultural discourse. In addition to the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, the exhibition will also be showcased in the Museum of Fine Arts in Split (11 February 2022 - 27 March 2022), and each museum will present works of Croatian female artists from their respective collections. The exhibition catalogue will accompany both set-ups, the distribution of which will enable foreign audiences, who are drawn to Kiki Smith’s charisma, to get to know the century of prolific work of Croatian female artists. It is a beautiful position of solidarity and sisterhood by vocation that transcends existing global structures of power and fame relations.

Croatian Artist in exhibition set-up at NMMU: Nevenka Arbanas, Biserka Baretić, Jagoda Buić, Vlasta Delimar, Ina Drutter, Marta Ehrlich, Ksenija Kantoci, Nives Kavurić Kurtović, Milena Lah, Sofija Naletilić Penavuša, Vesna Popržan, Slava Raškaj, Nasta Rojc, Edita Schubert

Biography of the artist

Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve the body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing and textiles. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms and the human nervous system as well as by using unusual materials. Her later practice includes animal motifs, domestic objects and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of her installations and sculptures, the frequent topos of which are themes of gender with an emphasis on the construction of archetypal female types and situations. Her interpretation of motifs along with cultural references is inspired with the oneiric dimension of reality.

Kiki Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including over 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Previously, Smith was recognized in 2006 by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: People Who Shape Our World”. Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.

Translated by Robertina Tomić
Photo: From the Gloria: Croatian Female Artists Salute Kiki Smith exhibition set up at the NMMU. Goran Vranić ©National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Press conference held at the National Museum of Modern Art concerning the topic of “Renovation of the Vranyczany-Dobrinović Palace or stifling three cultural institutions with public money?”

 

  

On 11 November, Branko Franceschi, director of the National Museum of Modern Art and Biserka Rauter Plančić, the former long-term director of the Modern Gallery, as the Museum was known then, held a press conference at the National Museum of Modern Art concerning the topic of “Renovation of the Vranyczany-Dobrinović Palace or stifling three cultural institutions with public money?”.

On this occasion, the concept and the implementation of the preparation of project documentation were presented to the public, as well as what is indicated in the implementation of protection measures of the Vranyczany-Dobrinović Palace. The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU), as the nominal owner of the palace, has signed a contract with the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, in accordance with the Call for non-reimbursable funds for the implementation of measures to protect cultural heritage damaged in the earthquake on 22 March 2020, in the areas of the City of Zagreb, Krapina-Zagorje County and Zagreb County, from the European Union Solidarity Fund, which the said Ministry announced and implemented. As can be seen on the website of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the amount of HRK 65,361,673.71 is allocated for the preparation of project documentation and implementation of protection measures for the Vranyczany-Dobrinović Palace (Modern Gallery), Hebrangova 1-3/Strossmayerov trg 12, Zagreb.

It is evident, from HAZU’s previous actions, that the said exorbitant amount of HRK 65,361,673.71 of public funds will be invested in the renovation of the building that will prevent normal functioning, let alone progress and development of museological standards of the three institutions of exceptional cultural and public importance which are housed therein – specifically, the National Museum of Modern Art, the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Archives of Fine Arts with a holdings of more than 10,000 archival units, which operates at the address Gundulićeva 24.

Referring to the long-standing unresolved issues and neglected problems of management and ownership of the palace, the speakers presented their experiences regarding the current and historical relationship between the NMMU and the HAZU through the prism of a deeply unsatisfactory reconstruction planning process, and called on the executive and administrative component of state government to protect cultural property and cultural institutions as major public values from the arbitrariness of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Photo: from the archives of the National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb