Tag: 2002.

Željko Badurina, Seve – Red, 2002

Željko Badurina
Seve – Red, 2002
inkjet print on canvas
100 x 100 cm
MG-6844

In his work, Željko Badurina (1966) often problematizes contemporary visual culture and social life phenomena, such as mass media, consumer society, and kitsch manifestations at different social levels. His work is characterized by humor, irony, absurdity, and Luddism, as well as reinterpretation, simulation, montage procedures, and the frequent use of ready-made and pop art. In the pop artist series of portraits, he uses enlarged photos of famous people, which are conceptually based on the works of Andy Warhol. The images are enlarged to a format of 100 x 100 cm, whereby each person gets their characteristic color. The artist thus humorously translates Warhol's process of duplicating the same motif into a domestic situation, reflecting the socio-cultural context in which we live.
"Seve - Red" is a portrait of Severina, one of the most famous singers in Croatia. The work is made with inkjet printed on canvas, using bright colors and high contrast to emphasize the iconographic status of the subject. Alluding to Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe, it shows her against a red background with signature red lipstick and green eyeshadow. By presenting Severina as a pop-culture icon, it indicates the transience and superficiality of such fame, therefore this portrait should be viewed as a comment on the phenomenon of celebrity culture and its influence on society.
At the same time, and in today's context, the portrayal of Severina as a celebrity figure who actively participates in social changes opens up questions about the role and responsibility of public figures in society. Known for her support of social and political issues, including women's rights and the LGBTIQA+ community, Severina uses her popularity to draw attention to critical social problems.

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

Vlasta Žanić, Bare, 2002

Vlasta Žanić
Bare, 2002
video-performance, MP4 3' 25''
MG-6841e

The video performance “Bare” belongs, as the artist herself emphasizes, to a series of “expressive performances (Closing, Bare, Distancing...) that carried a strong emotional charge and the need to express myself immediately. Sculpture did not provide me with the opportunity to express myself. It was slow, static, and not direct enough. Although it actually took me quite some time and cour-age to dare to stage my first performance, the transition from sculpture to a completely new and different medium was a great revolution for me at that time.” In “Bare,” Žanić enhances her face by plucking her eyebrows. The close-up shot of a static camera follows this ritual of beautification in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they are observing the scene from the position of a mirror that supposedly reflects the artist. The performance is accompanied by a musical background: an indis-tinct Latin love song composed of clichés about romantic love, acoustic guitar, celebration of female beauty, the inevitability of love's farewell, promises of an imminent reunion, etc. It is interesting to compare Vlasta Žanić’s performance with Sanja Iveković’s video work “Make-up, Make-down” from 1978, also part of the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art. Both videos question the relationship between women, beauty, and (male) desire, but each does so in a different and almost diametrically opposed way. While Sanja Iveković’s video generally follows the aesthetics of high production television, thus more directly addressing the social or patriarchal determination of women, “Bare,” in line with the production possibilities of its time, expresses a certain aesthetics of home video, thus moving more into the sphere of private rather than social experience. This differ-ence is also contributed to, of course, by the absence of the artist’s face in Sanja Iveković’s video, whereas it is centrally positioned in Vlasta Žanić’s video. The “poor” lighting of the face, its continu-ous approach and retreat from the camera, as well as the artist’s constant gaze into it, create a certain impression of excessive closeness between the artist and the viewer and further define the artist’s understanding of performance as an expressive act.
Vasta Žanić obtained a degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1990, where she has been teaching as a professor since 2018. With a group of artists, she represented Croatia at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and has staged numerous exhibitions in Zagreb, Split, Buenos Aires, Graz, New York, Düsseldorf, and Prague.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Still image from the video - from the National Museum of Modern Art's Archives

Milivoj Bijelić, Denkbild strikte Observanz, 2002

Milivoj Bijelić
Denkbild strikte Observanz, 2002
serigraphy, oil on canvas
85 x 155 cm
MG-7019

Milivoj Bijelić (1951) is an intriguing artist who absorbs conceptual, primary-analytical and monochrome tenets of High Modern art in painting (Blue, 1976) and minimalist installations with postmodern correlations from the New Image Painting onwards. This characterizes the artist’s cognitive execution aesthetic and materiality of the medium, which is observable ever since his primary-analytical phase. He obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (Š. Perić), and attended postgraduate studies at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut vorr Schone Kunsten in Antwerp (1977 – 1978). He was an associate in Lj. Ivančić’s and N. Reiser’s Master’s Workshop (1978 – 1980), and has lived and worked in Düsseldorf since the 1980s. Bijelić establishes his own sign Homo rebus that he shapes into an enigmatic pictogram, a paraphrase of Da Vinci’s man with outstretched limbs which he modulates in paintings, painting-objects and installations (45th Venice Biennale, 1993). This sign is the measure of all things, and transformed into an artistic matrix it is an image of the figure and the figure of an image, a code and a sign of the human figure in general. (paraphrase, J. auf der Lake). The painting Denkbild strikte Observanz / Thinking, Strict Observation (2002) characterizes Bijelić’s oeuvre to this day based on the philosophical and sociological precepts that the artist conveys directly. It is a raster image with an enigmatic decoration, a honeycomb-shaped matrix – stamps of Homo rebus and a horizontal floating figure of a man above them made of conical matter of colour which, when observed from the side, becomes a vibrant echo, representative in appearance. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad (Zagreb, Düsseldorf, Bochum, Munich, Ljubljana, Cologne), and his works are part of many recent collections and museums. He participated in the Biennial exhibitions in Saõ Paolo in 1982, Cairo in 1994, and his current art project Et in Barabaria Ego finds its home in Bribir.

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

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