Tag: 1994.

Peruško Bogdanić, Parsifal, 1994

Peruško Bogdanić
Parsifal, 1994
stone, carving
176 x 35.5 x 30 cm
MG-6498

Peruško Bogdanić’s sculpture Parsifal, created in 1994, is composed of stacked pure geometric bodies. Following the form of a totem, Bogdanić stacks two elongated cubes one above the other, culminating with a sphere at the top. By condensing the form, he aligns himself with the late modernist primary, pure form characterized by a departure from narrativity.
Croatian sculptor Peruško Bogdanić (1949, Hvar) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1976. He worked as a full professor at the Academy from 1995 until 2007, and served as its dean from 2012 to 2014. Since 1996, he has been a mentor and, since 2002, the artistic director of the Montraker International Student School of Sculpture in Vrsar. Bogdanić joined the postmodernist movement and primarily created works in wood and stone. By combining a constructivist approach with associative, organic forms, he paved new paths in sculptural considerations at the end of the 20th century. He has staged numerous solo exhibitions in Hvar, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Minneapolis, Dubrovnik, Berlin, Detroit, Rovinj, Split, Vienna, Rijeka, Klanjec, and Skopje. He has also received numerous awards, including at the Youth Salon (Zagreb, 1982), the Triennial of Croatian Sculpture (Zagreb, 1991), the Biennial of Sculptural Drawing (Budapest, 1992), and the Croatian Drawing Triennial (Zagreb, 1996). He has created several public sculptures in Sisak, Zagreb, Labin, Edinburgh, and Poreč.

Text: Lorena Šimić, trainee curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: From the Artist's archives

Vlado Zrnić “The Border of Time”, 1994

Vlado Zrnić
“The Border of Time”, 1994
MG- 6917

“The act of observation is comprised of the observer and the observed. Between these two entities there is a pause, a completely unpredictable reality that I perceive as an open dialogue with life”, said Vlado Zrnić, an artist and film director from Zadar, in an interview with Slobodna Dalmacija in 2008.

After having obtained a degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 1989, Zrnić turned to film and video art, and by the end of the 1990s he had already received several awards for his work at national and international festivals. The critics characterised Zrnić’s films (Mirila, A Day Under the Sun) as ‘poetic documentaries’, emphasising the importance of the visual over the narrative aspects of the film.

In the video “The Border of Time” from 1994, one of the early examples of Zrnić’s exploration of the moving image, we find all these attributes in nuce. It is a recording of a stormy night on the coast near Zadar. Scenes of the sea surface and distant shore can only be recognised thanks to lightning strikes, that is short flashes of light. Strong contrasts between the darkness and lightning flashes interfere with the camera technology in an unexpected way. When the lightning strike is extremely powerful, the image dissolves or is full of glitches, rendering the scene unrecognisable. In moderate cases of flashing, on the other hand, the camera manages to briefly show the surface of the sea, however, almost entirely abstractly: the water surface is then nothing but a vague luminescence, a phenomenon that can belong to anything. The video ends with a kind of catharsis. The storm has, in fact, reached land and the sound of rain has overpowered the thunder. This is the moment Zrnić marked with a shot of the lighthouse lantern and its lamp. However, as the rain intensifies, and the camera lens becomes more and more obscured with water, we can only make out the lighthouse at the end of the video as a bright spot that pulsates unremittingly in the darkness.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

Antun Maračić, Emptied Frames, Missing Contents, 1994

Antun Maračić
Emptied Frames, Missing Contents, 1994

Antun Maračić is a versatile artist and cultural professional. Although he had a long and distinctive career as an artist, he is perhaps best known to the general public for his longstanding management of the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik, the Zvonimir Gallery and the Forum Gallery in Zagreb. He started his career within the New Art Practice movement, a specific variant of Conceptual Art in Croatia, with photography having been one of his interests since the very beginning. In 1994, he started photographing the Emptied Frames, Missing Contents series of photographs. These are emptied frames on the facades of buildings in which advertising or noticeboards normally stand. Maračić would mount his name and the name of the photography series on these frames and – now that they were slightly modified – photograph them. In the process, he not only captured a specific moment in social history, but was also attracted by emptiness and the potential of new content, of which he says the following: The energy of emptiness is incredibly strong because it involves many possibilities – it includes the possibility of the existence of an idea of what no longer exists, as well as the idea of what could possibly exist in that space. Despite its blankness, emptiness is a dynamic state because it includes that which is potential, that which is possible.

Antun Maračić was born on 12th December 1950 in Nova Gradiška. He graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1976. As a multimedia artist, he exhibited in over 30 solo and in about a hundred group exhibitions in both Croatia and abroad. From 1978 to 1980 he was a member of the Podroom Working Community of Artists collective. From 1981 to 1991 he was an active associate of the Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb. From 1992 to 1997 he was the director of the Zvonimir Gallery in Zagreb, and from 2000 to 2012 the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik. From 2012 to 2016 when he retired, he was the head of the Forum Gallery in Zagreb. He is the author of numerous texts on art (reviews, critiques, polemics, essays) published in dailies and periodicals.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Antun Maračić

Željko Lapuh Constructive Growth I., 1994

Željko Lapuh
Constructive Growth I, 1994
oil on canvas, 195 x 145 cm
MG-7029

Željko Lapuh najznačajniji je slikar postmoderne varijante metafizičkog slikarstva. Rođen je 1951. u Splitu. Diplomirao je Akademiju likovnih umjetnosti u Zagrebu u klasi prof. Šime Perića. Od 1976. do 1980. bio je suradnik Majstorske radionice prof. Lj. Ivančića i prof . N. Reisera. Samostalno izlaže od 1976. Sudjelovao je na mnogobrojnim samostalnim i skupnim izložbama u zemlji i inozemstvu (Austrija, Francuska, Italija, Japan, Mađarska, Nizozemska, Njemačka, Španjolska, Turska, Egipat, Švedska, Slovenija, Bosna i  Hercegovina, Island, Makedonija, Belgija, USA). Dobitnik je niza nagrada i priznanja od kojih izdvajamo Prvu nagradu za slikarstvo na Svjetskom biennalu hrvatske umjetnosti u Torontu 1993., te Grand Prix na 29. zagrebačkom salonu 1993. Od kasnih 80-ih u svoja djela unosi ironični humor i dimenziju straha i strave.  Željko Lapuh sebi svojstvenim postmodernim citatima (Giorgio de Chirico, Gorgio Morandi)  i vlastitim inačicama metafizičkog slikarstva nijeme, prazninom urezane lelujate skulpturalne figure i masa (Konstruktivni rast I, 1990.) produbljuje upite muklih i pustih, posve onostranih bivanja. Iza predmetnog krije se tajna duša stvari. Prikrivena i zatočena unutar masiva i ljušture ne dopire prema empirijskoj stvarnosti. Gama slike je u svjetlu.

Text: Željko Marciuš, Museum advisor of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

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