Anabel Zanze,
Reading Kipke II, 2014
oil on canvas
100 x 150 cm
MG-8457

Anabel Zanze (1971) is a prominent Croatian verbo-visual painter, a representative of a kind of visual lettrism. An artist who writes as she paints, and paints as she writes. The textual-visual form and refined aesthetics of the artist’s paintings require reading in addition to visual insight. Text and image in a single creation are analogous to polarities, fillings and blanks, binary codes and labyrinths of image-letters on a complex background. The image field is open to free, aesthetic and mental-conceptual interpretations. With her gift for unobtrusive optical examination of the image field A. Zanze questions the visual features, laws and accents of her own intellectual painting. She graduated in 1996 from the Department of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of prof. A. Kuduz. She has organized several solo exhibitions, the most recent being: Text in Tension, Gliptotheque HAZU, Zagreb and Museum of Fine Arts, Split, 2019; Fifty-Eight Paintings, Vukovar Municipal Museum – Oranžerija Gallery, Vukovar, 2016; Grisailles, Radnička galerija, Zagreb, 2015 – 2016; Quotations, Museum of Modern Art, Dubrovnik, 2015; Types of Words, Museum of Contemporary Art – No Gallery, Zagreb, 2014. The painting Reading Kipke II, 2014, is a dedication to Ž. Kipke, but also a kind of verbal-visual disintegration of the image. The English translation of Kipke’s texts departs from the artist’s system of image-pages. With a significant enlargement of letters, the image is dynamized, and the semantic meaning of text is destroyed. Letters are freed from the rules of typography, and in three-partite painting (black, light blue and yellow) and the interdependencies between the absorption of the surface and glowing letters, letter-words hover above the surface of the picture (paraphrase, A. Zanze).
The artist’s works can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Fine Arts in Split, Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik, Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek, and many other museums, private and corporate collections in Croatia and abroad.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb