Tag: 1979.

Damir Sokić, 15 x 25 W 60 Metres of Electrical Installation, 1979

Damir Sokić
(1952)
15 x 25 W 60 Metres of Electrical Installation, 1979
lightbulbs, insulated wire, dimensions variable
l=600 cm
MG-6744

In 1977, Damir Sokić obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Prof. Nikola Reiser. From 1977 to 1979, he worked as an associate in Ljubo Ivančić’s and Nikola Reiser’s Master Workshop. From 1986 to 1993 he lived and worked in New York. Between 1999 and 2019, he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He writes about art. He has been exhibiting paintings, sculptures, objects and installations continuously since 1976. He staged over forty solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects.
Geometric space, paintings and installations with connotations of Arte Povera are Sokić’s artistic preoccupation, which he uses to create his artistic reality. He constructs objects and lumino-kinetic installations and reinterprets the avant-garde with references to Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism.
With its minimalist form, the post-avant-garde light installation made of 60 metres of electrical wire with fifteen 25 W incandescent bulbs distributed on the floor, suggests an autonomous site-specific lumino environment that critically examines the medium of sculpture in the correlations of matter and idea.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, 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

Ante Rašić, Brushstrokes, 1977-1978; A Brush Repetition Structure, 1977-1978; Torn Papers Painted White, 1979; Cut Papers Painted White, 1979

Ante Rašić
(1953)
Brushstrokes, 1977-1978
wall paint on hardboard
37.5×29 cm
MG-8445

A Brush Repetition Structure, 1977-1978
wall paint on hardboard
34×24 cm
MG-8446

Torn Papers Painted White, 1979
wall paint and paper on hardboard
34×25.5 cm
MG-8447

Cut Papers Painted White, 1979
wall paint and paper on hardboard
33.7×24.5 cm
MG-8448

Ante Rašić (1953) is a multifaceted sculptor, painter and designer of High Modernism and Postmodernism. He graduated in painting in 1977 under Prof. Nikola Reiser from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he has been teaching since 1995. He worked as an associate at painters Ljubo Ivančić and Nikola Reiser’s master workshop in Zagreb (1977-1978), and at Prof. Michel Charpentier’s sculpture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris (1978-1979). Featuring closed forms, plastic conciseness, processuality, purity of design and the use of achromatic white, his expression was formed in the 1970s within the framework of Conceptual, Primary and Analytical Art.

Created by gradually applying coatings of white wall paint on hardboard resembling a tabula rasa and evoking nothing but their name, process and elementary fact of being, his Brushstrokes (1977-1978), A Brush Repetition Structure (1977-1978), Torn Papers Painted White (1979) and Cut Papers Painted White (1979) paintings are great examples of Rašić’s primary-analytical strategy of expression. According to art historian Zvonko Maković, Rašić’s painting is not a space for recording the artist’s emotions, but first and foremost a surface on which the author critically explores the possibilities of painting. After the 1980s, Rašić started creating collages, reliefs, and paper and metal sculptures of suspended rhythms which were recordings of the process of creation and free-form sculpting (e.g., Noon series, 1984-1985). In 1998 he started creating a series of ambient installations with ready-made mirrors, which he uses in different contexts and environments, all of which was crowned with the giant Croatian Apoxyomenos at the Art is Beautiful exhibition (2011), which was also presented at the Church of St. Donatus in Zadar (2018). His In Anticipation of Rain land art piece executed for the White Road Project during the 36th Mediterranean Sculpture Symposium in the Dubrova Sculpture Park near Labin in Istria has received multiple awards in both Croatia and abroad. His works are in the holdings of numerous museums, private collections and public institutions. In 1997 he received the Order of the Croatian Morning Star with the Image of Marko Marulić, Croatia’s national order bestowed for one’s achievements in culture.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: From the Artist’s Archives

Mladen Galić, Spatial Fact XX, 1979

Mladen Galić (1934)
Spatial Fact XX, 1979
oil on canvas
135×135 cm
MG-4165

Mladen Galić (1934) is a classic and one of the first representatives of Minimalism and Installation Art in Croatia. He has been creating his own variants of Reductive and Geometric Abstraction. He has also been creating objects, collages, softer Abstraction organic forms, sculpture and graphic art – that is, all aspects of graphic design – which influenced the Zagreb School of Graphic Arts. Although the mediums he has used since the Post-Art-Informel period are diverse and heterogeneous, Galić’s oeuvre as a whole has not been visually dispersed. On the contrary, his oeuvre is coherent and features an elegant harmony of forms and structures imbued with his highly form-specific expression which he has been developing continuously since the High Modernism of the 1960s. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb between 1956 and 1959, and then moved to Paris in the late 1960s. In 1965 he started reducing painterly gestures to plastic facts. The fiercely criticised Hit Parade exhibition (Student Centre Gallery, 1967), where Galić exhibited together with Miroslav Šutej, Ante Kuduz and Ljerka Šibenik, marked the transition from paintings-objects to Installation Art, and heralded symbolically the subsequent urban ambience action and exhibition called Possibilities for 1971. After the objects he modelled in wood and plastic, since the 1970s he has been working on neon light ambiences. In the late 1970s he returned with his Spatial Facts series to the geometric dual principle of achromatic black on achromatic white. Featuring nothing but a polygonal black ‘geometric circle’ on a white background, Galić’s Spatial Fact XX painting from 1979 is from this optical-visual series of paintings.

Mladen Galić has been exhibiting since 1961 at both solo and group exhibitions both in Croatia and abroad. He has been awarded many times for his work and in 2018 the National Museum of Modern Art set up a retrospective exhibition of his work curated by art historian and critic Ješa Denegri.

Text: Željko Marciuš, 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

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