The exhibition Stories Backwards by Dubrovnik-based artist Ivona Šimunović, produced by the platform NOMAD – Croatian Office for Contemporary Art and curated by Sabina Salamon, opened on January 9 at the Josip Račić Gallery. On this occasion, speeches were given by Branko Franceschi, Director of the National Museum of Modern Art; curator Sabina Salamon; Jelena Tamindžija Donnart on behalf of the NOMAD – Croatian Office for Contemporary Art platform; and Ivona Šimunović, an academically trained painter who presents herself to the Zagreb audience with ten recent oil paintings on canvas created between 2023 and the present.

According to the curator, the exhibited works belong to two distinct cycles. One consists of horizons that the artist observes on a daily basis. The other addresses past periods from the artist’s personal life, represented by the oil painting Curriculum Vitae, in which sketch-like, seemingly random scribbles—actually gestures—manifest the unreliability of memory and the emergence of emotions that Ivona inscribes exactly as they surface in consciousness: intermittently and chaotically. Memory, as a leitmotif of large-format works imbued with the language of the repressed, appears in several other paintings as well, including Write Me Your Name and The Temporality of Memory.

The exhibition was realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City of Zagreb’s Office for Culture and Civil Society. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue in Croatian and English, featuring a text by Sabina Salamon and graphic design by Ana Zubić.

The Zagreb public can visit the exhibition until February 1, 2026.

Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb