Matko Trebotić
Sheet 2, from the portfolio “Yugoslav Graphics” (1979)
Lithograph on paper
600 × 420 mm
MG-4220

Matko Trebotić (b. 1935) is a prominent Croatian painter of cultural and natural memory — a contemporary chronicler who finds the local in the universal and the universal spirit in regional, native motifs. His entire body of work in drawing and painting is founded on a dialectic of creation that condenses the world into symbols, and then expands those symbols back into the world. This is a reduction of narrative. His signature motifs include Old Croatian chapels, skulls, crosses, and cypresses — iconic elements of what critic Ivo Šlade called the “Trebotićian” iconography.
Trebotić graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade in 1961. His first unofficial exhibition was held in Bochum in 1968, later recognized in the 2018 retrospective Fifty Years of Solitude... in Split. In the early 1970s, he studied at the renowned Folkwangschule in Essen under Prof. Hermann Schardt, as a Meisterschüler, where he also trained in graphic arts. From 1971 onward, he lived in Düsseldorf, where he developed a friendship with the influential artist Joseph Beuys.
Sheet 2 from the portfolio Yugoslav Graphics (1979) represents — as is characteristic of Trebotić — a memory of his native Split, rendered as if in the palm of a hand and simultaneously universal in its expression. It is a sublime blend of cultural layers: Antiquity, early Christianity, the early and high Middle Ages, the Renaissance… and beyond. This inexhaustible source of imagery reflects the artist’s deep personal necessity and sense of belonging to a multilayered site — a place both archaeological and spiritual — in stark contrast to the visual cacophony of contemporary trends, aesthetic fashions, and oversimplified ideologies.
Trebotić’s works are held in major Croatian and international collections and museums. He also painted ceremonial stage curtains, collectively titled Adriatic Polyptych, for leading Mediterranean theatres in Croatia. In 2009, he received the City of Split Lifetime Achievement Award.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum advisor of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb