Anabel Zanze
m (red), 2010
oil on canvas
120 x 150 cm
MG-7299

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 peculiarities, 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 staged 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 – Orangery 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. Painting approximately 130 letters in a textually layered line in the painting (m) red, 2010, the artist counted and coloured the letter m in red, as a concept that, in the polarities between the achromatic and the prevailing black, neutral font of the letters and the accented red m, spreads through the optical-hypnotic fractal beauty that vibrates the entire composition like an unpredictable chaotic attractor. 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