Stanko Jančić
(1932 – 2018)
On the Beach, 1968
polyester, paint, wood
37 x 213 x 64 cm
MG-3908

Stanko Jančić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1956 and worked as an associate in Antun Augustinčić’s Master Workshop until 1970. He was a member of the Biafra Art Group from 1970 to 1975. Since 1980, he has worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. With his analytical, metaphysical and intimate approaches to sculpture, he expanded the understanding of sculpture and occupied a special place in Croatian modern art.
In the spirit of the Biafra Group, he portrayed real people in the series Street People (1968 - 1974). He was later preoccupied by fundamental sculptural problems, that is, the relationship between volume and space, and especially movement, and he created small-scale sculptures, and multiplied, stylised figures often close to the style of Futurism. In the recurrent theme of the female nude, he reduced the body to refined basic multiplicative structures of volume, space and movement (The Five O-Clock Tea series, 2000, donation to the NMMU).
After the first expressionist works, he started to use dramatically dynamic surfaces in order to form hyperrealistic figures in coloured polyester, close to Pop-Art and New Figuration. In the 1960s, critical of the contemporary moment, Jančić introduced everyday themes with female figures into our sculpture, whereby the female body is shown as a consumerist object, deliberately underlining their eroticism in order to achieve the opposite effect – a critical stance toward damaging the dignity of women. The reclining female nude in the work On the Beach is the first in a series of hyperrealistic female figures – dolls, with accentuated erotic properties, as objects of desire and commercialised eroticism.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Reproduction : From the NMMU exhibition display "One World" at the Governor's Palace in Zadar / Foto: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

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