Kata Mijatović
Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, 2010
ink-jet photography
MG-8518

In August 2010, Croatian artist Kata Mijatović (1956) staged a performance at the plateau of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, which included Ivan Kožarić’s sculpture “The Shape of Space XIII”. The performance consisted of sleeping in Kožarić’s sculpture and lasted six hours, from midnight to dawn. The title of the performance is also a reference to Kožarić. In private situations, this celebrated Croatian sculptor actually called this sculpture “Earth, Sky”, thus suggesting that the entire visible world could somehow be treated as being between the sky and earth. The artist put this Kožarić’s metaphor into action, choosing the sculpture, as curator Branko Franceschi notes, “as a place where she will lay her makeshift bed and thus make her long-term work on the inclusion of unconscious human energies into the space of practical human existence, through symbolic artistic language, present within the great tradition of neo-avantgarde art.” The performance “Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth” symbolically marked the beginning of a period in which dreams, as well as the process of sleeping and dreaming, will occupy one of the key places in the artist’s work. Dreams will also determine her attitude towards society. Specifically, the artist sees dreaming as the process that is similar to artistic creation – “When we dream, we all become artists”, Kata Mijatović points out – so in a certain way she builds on the tradition of avant-garde calls for the democratization of art.
In 1981, Kata Mijatović graduated from the Faculty of Law in Osijek. From 1988 to 1991, she was a member of the informal art group “Močvara” (“Swamp”) in Beli Manastir. In 1991, she entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and in 1997, she obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From 2005 to 2019, she managed the AŽ Gallery in Zagreb. She received multiple awards for her work, and her works are part of prominent museum collections in Croatia. She lives and works in Zagreb.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo : from the National Museum of Modern Art's archives