Stjepan Gračan
(1941)
X-1 Group (a seated figure), 1971
polyester, paint
MG-3401(1)
Stjepan Gračan graduated and received his master’s degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the same year – 1968. He specialised in monumental sculpture after attending Prof. Antun Augustinčić’s master workshop between 1969 and 1971. He has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts since 1988.
Gračan was one of the founding members of the Biafra Art Group, which was active between 1970 and 1978. Having embraced expressive and engaged Figurative Art as their expression using naturalist methods and major deformations in their depictions, the group organised exhibitions and actions in non-museum spaces in general and on the streets in particular. Remaining consistent with radical Figurative Art and the message with which he has looked to act on human conscience and emotions, once the Biafra Art Group dissolved Gračan started creating more diverse works. In the context of lives destroyed, he has also been modelling animal figures.
At the beginning of his involvement in the Biafra Art Group, Stjepan Gračan sculpted a series of burnt life-size figures. By using polyester and paint, he created burnt, crushed and melted figures, whose clothing and body surface are coloured, such as his X-1 Group sculpture from 1971. The sculpture aims to bombard the conscience of and prompt spiritual unrest in both individuals and society at large in the face of traumatic existence.
Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb