I would like to thank the NMMU Director, Mr. Branko Franceschi, for extending this invitation of collaboration, and it is indeed a great honour and pleasure for me to be the first author of the exhibition and accompanying publication about the forgotten and rediscovered visual artist from Zagreb, René Miković, who studied, lived, and worked in the Netherlands. Miković’s art captivated me through his painting “Dead Bird,” which was presented in 2021 at the NMMU exhibition exploring the theme of death. In it, I recognized an artist who used a palette of earthy colours, wings deeply immersed in the dream of artistic immortality, to find a metaphor for one’s own transience measured in golden ratio. It is already evident from “Dead Bird” that Miković was inspired by Rembrandt and Flemish painting from a very young age. He therefore went to his spiritual homeland, where he became an equal protagonist of the Dutch new realist painting. Having honed his exceptional painting skills with the trompe l'œil technique, which involves optical illusion, his paintings often have a hallucinatory optical effect on the observer. In addition to this, he frequently quoted and paraphrased the works of his role models – Rembrandt, van Eyck, and van der Weyden – in a contemporary artistic context, thus achieving a meta-art interpretation of the entire history of Western art. I am pleased that with the visual set-up of this exhibition, co-authored by Director Franceschi and myself, we have brought Miković’s work back into the spotlight. Otherwise, the silent doll, a recurring motif throughout Miković’s exceptionally intriguing and powerful body of work, would have remained the sole witness to his refined melancholies – an injustice that, I hope, we have finally rectified. – said Mirna Rudan Lisak, PhD, during tonight’s opening of the exhibition “René Miković – Hallucinatory Melancholies” at the Josip Račić Gallery. In addition to the author of the exhibition and essay in the richly illustrated publication in both Croatian and English, Branko Franceschi, the Director of the National Museum of Modern Art and co-curator of the exhibition, addressed the numerous guests.

With the exhibition “Hallucinatory Melancholies,” which can be viewed at the Josip Račić Gallery until 29 October, the National Museum of Modern Art, for the first time posthumously, presents and values the hitherto completely unexplored work of René Miković. In addition to two oil paintings on canvas, “Dead Bird” and “Doll from a Box” (both from the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, dated 1978), the interested public will have the opportunity to see around thirty works owned by the artist’s friends - cultural manager Ivan Maruna, musician Darko Petrinjak, and writer Sanja Pilić. Along with them, among the first to visit the exhibition were academic painter and writer Dimitrije Popović, visual artist Nenad Marasović, photographers Mario Kučera, Luka Mjeda, and Vladimira Spindler, internationally acclaimed guitarist Petrit Çeku, distinguished Portuguese classical guitarist Pedro Ribeiro Rodrigues, curator and gallery director Martina Marić Rodrigues of Trotoar Gallery, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU) Leila Topić, museum advisor at MSU Nataša Ivančević, Rumjana Meštrović, daughter-in-law of sculptor Ivan Meštrović, musicologist Seadeta Midžić, theatre and film actress Lukrecija Brešković, choreographer and educator Tihana Škrinjarić, host and editor at Croatian Radio and Television Ivana Vilović, and Majda Bekić-Vejzović, the wife of the late painter Fadil Vejzović...

Photo: from the opening of the "René Miković - Hallucinatory Melancholies" exhibition at the Josip Račić Gallery / Goran Vranić and National Museum of Modern Art's archives © National Museum of Modern Art, 2023