Tag: 1968.

Milena Lah, In Honour of Our Lady of Laurana, 1968

Milena Lah
(1920 – 2003)
In Honour of Our Lady of Laurana, 1968
casting, bronze
64 x 40 x 40 cm
MG-6703

Milena Lah obtained a degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1949 and worked as an associate in sculptor Vanja Radauš’s master workshop until 1950. Between 1951 and 1955, she continued her sculptural training in Rome, Florence, Milan and Paris. She participated in many prestigious international sculpture symposia as an established artist.
Early on, Lah created realistic sculptures, after which she aspired to synthesise form and the symbolic expressiveness of material. Inspired by Croatian art and literature, in her oeuvre she looked to combine traditional forms with contemporary sculptural ideas. She paid special attention to the figures of women and children. In her later series, centring mostly on mythological themes, she combined geometric and figural elements. Having used almost all sculpture techniques and materials, she created a prolific oeuvre which, thanks to the purity of elementary forms, metaphors, associations and interactivity, is rightly considered to be one of the most authentic oeuvres in the history of Croatian sculpture.
The work dedicated to Our Lady of Laurana is modelled as an abstract portrait head in a three-partite circular-audible form with expanding plate-like round discs (reminiscent of the Renaissance-styled hair). The neck is long, with a wide base and an oval-shaped bottom. The highly polished golden surface lustre furnishes the work with sublime sacral dignity.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Ljerka Šibenik, Altuglas I, 1968

Ljerka Šibenik
Altuglas I, 1968
object, altuglas
77.5 x 89 x 8 cm
MG-4164

Ljerka Šibenik experiments with the creation of complex structures and environments, curiously examining the relationships between spatial value, colour and shape, as well as between object and space. By creating lumino-kinetic objects, she focuses on naturalness beyond the hard geometric orthodoxy, while the path from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional dynamically passes through points of discord that circulate the space. The object made in 1968, in the style of Optical Kinetic art, is indicatively titled Altuglas I, after the thermoplastic material from which it is made.
Croatian artist Ljerka Šibenik (1935, Zagreb) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1962, after which she attended K. Hegedušić’s Master Workshop from 1962 to 1964. Between 1975 and 2003, she managed the Nova Gallery and focused on presenting young avant-garde, as well as artists of the older generation whose work is connected with innovations in the artistic context. As a member of the second generation of Croatian avant-garde artists, she experimented with the creation of complex structures and environments, which can be seen in her work titled the Black Object 2 from 1968. At the same time, she created minimalist, brightly coloured objects.

Text: Lorena Šimić, trainee curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Vanja Radauš, Sculpture 36, 1968

Vanja Radauš
Sculpture 36, 1968
bronze / casting
71 x 54 x 22 cm
MG-2657

Croatian academic Vanja Radauš (1906–1975) was educated in Zagreb and Paris. During the period from 1932 to 1934, he was a member of the socially engaged Earth Association of Artists, which operated from 1929 to 1935 when the association’s activities were banned by the authorities. He worked as a teacher at the School of Crafts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He was a distinctive artistic personality. His specific sculpture was characterized by pronounced expressiveness and surrealistic motifs of a bizarre imaginative world.
In the late 1960s, Vanja Radauš explored, among other things, the abstract form of the so-called ‘pure shapes. During this time, he created collages in line with the Exat 51 and New Tendencies movements. In the Sculpture 36, for example, we can discern undulating forms reminiscent of Bakić’s abstraction combined with the rough, textured surfaces of Dušan Džamonja. Stylistically and expressively completely separate from the rest of his oeuvre and his recognizable style, this segment of Radauš’s artistic output was criticized by art critics of that time for a number of shortcomings.

Text: Ivana Rončević Elezović, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Stanko Jančić, On the Beach, 1968

Stanko Jančić
(1932 – 2018)
On the Beach, 1968
polyester, paint, wood
37 x 213 x 64 cm
MG-3908

Stanko Jančić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1956 and worked as an associate in Antun Augustinčić’s Master Workshop until 1970. He was a member of the Biafra Art Group from 1970 to 1975. Since 1980, he has worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. With his analytical, metaphysical and intimate approaches to sculpture, he expanded the understanding of sculpture and occupied a special place in Croatian modern art.
In the spirit of the Biafra Group, he portrayed real people in the series Street People (1968 - 1974). He was later preoccupied by fundamental sculptural problems, that is, the relationship between volume and space, and especially movement, and he created small-scale sculptures, and multiplied, stylised figures often close to the style of Futurism. In the recurrent theme of the female nude, he reduced the body to refined basic multiplicative structures of volume, space and movement (The Five O-Clock Tea series, 2000, donation to the NMMU).
After the first expressionist works, he started to use dramatically dynamic surfaces in order to form hyperrealistic figures in coloured polyester, close to Pop-Art and New Figuration. In the 1960s, critical of the contemporary moment, Jančić introduced everyday themes with female figures into our sculpture, whereby the female body is shown as a consumerist object, deliberately underlining their eroticism in order to achieve the opposite effect – a critical stance toward damaging the dignity of women. The reclining female nude in the work On the Beach is the first in a series of hyperrealistic female figures – dolls, with accentuated erotic properties, as objects of desire and commercialised eroticism.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Reproduction : From the NMMU exhibition display "One World" at the Governor's Palace in Zadar / Foto: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

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