Tag: 1997.

Ivica Malčić On the Wardrobe, 1997.

Ivica Malčić
On the Wardrobe, 1997
oil on board, 162.5 × 58.8 cm
MG-6507

Ivica Malčić is the most prominent Croatian painter associated with so-called "bad painting." Working within traditional media such as painting and drawing, he has developed a distinctive and original style characterized by raw iconography, immediacy, conceptual approaches to the image, free gesture, collage-like compositions, verbo-visual elements, anti-academicism, and a fierce critique of kitsch and bad art—paradoxically expressed through deliberately "bad" painting.
The conceptual nature of Malčić’s work lies in his disciplined, daily practice in the studio and his early adoption of serial formats. By the mid-1990s, he began exhibiting series of one hundred small-format paintings arranged into painterly installations (One Hundred Unexhibited Paintings / October 1991 – August 1995, 1995; repeated in 1998). His work is rooted in the exposure of personal life, a sharp critique of the art world, and an honest engagement with social realities—resulting in a painting practice that is both authentic and confrontational.
Since 2006, he has produced diary-like drawings and collages incorporating quotations from popular culture, often infused with self-ironic introspection. From the outset of his career, he has created polemical works that critique bourgeois values, the art market, and cultural institutions (Never a Slave, 2000; Never Mind Dimitrije..., 2005). In 2014, he began a realist-critical series titled Obituaries, based on press photography.
The painting On the Wardrobe (1997), executed in his characteristic oil-on-wood technique, depicts a levitating figure represented only by a pair of legs, hovering above chairs and a wardrobe, defying gravity. In art, such things are possible.
Malčić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1996 (under Miroslav Šutej) and exhibits regularly throughout Croatia. His works are part of the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb.

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 (detail)

Stephan Lupino (Ivan Lepen), “Željko Mavrović”, 1997

Stephan Lupino (Ivan Lepen)
"Željko Mavrović" (1997)
black and white photography, paper
75 x 50 cm
MG-6912

Stephan Lupino (1952), real name Ivan Lepen, is a Croatian photographer known for his distinctive style and international career. Lupino is a master of erotic photography and a versatile artist whose photos have been published in the world's leading fashion and art magazines such as Vogue, Zoom, King, Max, Photo, and Playboy. His work includes sculpture, painting, directing, advertising, music videos, and art films. He has published several books on his photographs, and his sculptures have been exhibited worldwide. He is recognizable for his avantgarde and innovative art, which he calls "lupinism."
The photo shows Croatian boxer Željko Mavrović in a moment that reflects his strength, determination, and intensity. The black-and-white photo emphasizes the contrast between light and shadow, highlighting the boxer's muscular build and facial expression. Lupino, although he most often photographed women, here shows skill in depicting the male subject with equal attention to detail and emotion. It shows Mavrović as a sensitive man who faces internal and external struggles. With this photograph, Lupino successfully conveys the multi-layered nature of male identity, breaking stereotypes about masculinity and emphasizing the humanity and vulnerability of even seemingly steadfast figures such as Mavrović.

Text: Marta Radman, curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Marta Radman
Photo: Stephan Lupino

Ivo Šebalj, My Memento of a Barbaric Act in Knin Church, 1997

Ivo Šebalj
My Memento of a Barbaric Act in Knin Church, 1997
oil on canvas
153 x 210 cm
MG-8394

Ivo Šebalj (1912-2002) was a modest individual, yet a classic of hermetic, meditative Lyrical Abstraction which is always correlated with a figural motif. Šebalj’s painting of existentialist intimism occupies the interspace between the concrete and the abstract, between the chromatic and the achromatic, between drawing and painting, where even in his most abstract works he painted figurative motifs however difficult they may be to recognise (Z. Rus). Through a relatively few themes (the smoker, the painter and his model, (self)portraits, female nudes, rooms, his experience of war, sacral motifs), Šebalj’s oeuvre always sustains a feeling of his personal insignificance in respect of the art of painting. Having taken a few gap years, between 1934 and 1942 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Lj. Babić and O. Mujadžić, and graduated under M. Tartaglia. He worked as a clerk, and it was only in 1954 that he started working in his profession – as a teacher at the School of Applied Arts and Design, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1961 to 1978. Šebalj’s oeuvre can be divided into several stages: after a period of anonymity, he started exhibiting as late as 1970 at the age of 58. The 1970s were the decade when he was discovered as an artist, the 1980s when he became famous, and the 1990s when he became universally acclaimed. The posthumous evaluation of his oeuvre is the final stage. Šebalj’s body of work transcends both local and national boundaries, and is his personal and impenetrable valorisation and revaluation of modernist painting (P. Picasso, F. Bacon, J. Dubuffet). He stated: while Picasso narrowed the world to a motif, what I tried to do was to expand motifs (according to art historian I. Zidić). Šebalj’s drawing is distinctive and his colour palette ranges from dark and dense to completely pure. Šebalj’s painting My Memento of a Barbaric Act in Knin Church from 1997 is his eternal remembrance, mediated by D. Fabijanić’s photograph, of acts of barbarism in Knin since the beginning of the Homeland War, when everything that could be destroyed and devastated was destroyed – including the looted and desecrated Franciscan Church of St. Anthony. The visualisation (a monumental diptych) of the barbaric act is painted in a typical Šebalj manner and conveys the harrowing experience and acts of cruelty perpetrated by the aggressor, as well as the expressive humanism for the universal suffering, of people, the city and heritage. It is a motif that is hard to fathom – a memento. The painting becomes a pierced target, a reflection of symbolic destruction rendered in achromatic and chromatic warm and cool yellow-green syncopated contrasts. In addition, the whiteness and blackness on a thick abstract foundation express personal – the possessive determiner my from the painting title – burden, despair, horror, but also not forgetting.

Text: Željko Marciuš, 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

Petar Barišić, Object-Relief, 1997

Petar Barišić
(1954)
Object-Relief, 1997
painted wood
156 x 174 x 61 cm
MG-6496

Petar Barišić obtained a degree in sculpture from the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts (I. Sabolić) in 1978, where he has been teaching since 2002. He was an associate in Frano Kršinić’s Master Workshop until 1981. A number of his sculptures and spatial installations have been installed in public spaces at home and abroad.
He has created a dynamic sculptural oeuvre, constantly challenging comprehensive spatial and formal correlations. He created variously conceived sculptures with avant-garde constructive aspirations. In earlier cycles, he modelled wooden and bronze biomorphic units, composed of several elements, deepening the spatial and mental conception of sculptural work (Wooden Sonata III, 1989). He then makes geometric ambient installations from wood, stainless steel, plexiglass and highly polished aluminium.
In the mid-1990s, the sculptor became preoccupied with relief, as a challenging flat surface, and he intuitively used the cubist practice of collage as his starting point, that is, he built dynamic spatial elements on a rectangular base with a dominant minimalist execution in wood and in a monochrome white colourway. Barišić’s remarkable series of Objects-Reliefs with a neutral surface and intersecting elegant spatial protrusions in different directions and angles that dynamize, with their shadows, the experience of space and the spiritual perception of forms, is the product of such considerations of the relationships between the static and the dynamic through a refined play of forms.

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