From 9 January to 1 February, the National Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition Stories Backwards by Dubrovnik-based artist Ivona Šimunović at the Josip Račić Gallery. Curated by Sabina Salamon, the exhibition features ten recent oil paintings on canvas created between 2023 and the present.
The works belong to two distinct cycles, as noted by the curator in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. One cycle comprises horizons, horizons, the primal images she observes in her daily life. The second explores internal shifts of space and time, exemplified by the large oil on canvas titled Biography, where sketchy, seemingly random marks (actually gestures) convey the unreliability of memory and the emergence of feelings exactly as they arise in consciousness – fragmented and disorderly. Memory, as a recurring motif in these large-scale works imbued with the language of the repressed, also
appears in several other pieces, including Write Me a Name and The Temporality of Memory.
The exhibition was realised with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb.

Image: Ivona Šimunović, Different Horizons, triptych, 2025. / oil on canvas, 150 x 450 cm
Cover Photo: Ivona Šimunović, Indefinitely, 2023. oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm