Tag: 2010.

Dalibor Stošić, Large Torso, 2010

Dalibor Stošić
(1958)
Large Torso, 2010
oak, steel
178 x 82 x 131 cm
MG-8624

Dalibor Stošić earned his sculpture degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1985, in the class of Professor Stipe Sikirica. He worked in the studio of Dušan Džamonja until 1988. He subsequently continued his training in Italy and France, where he established himself as a respected contemporary sculptor. Stošić later worked a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
Stošić’s striking sculptural oeuvre is characterised by a reductionist expression and hard materials such as wood and metal, which he assembles into diverse organic forms. His sculptures are compact, featuring closed geometric forms and refined execution, their proportions harmonious and their composition symmetrical. Varying his techniques and remodelling his designs, Stošić often develops a motif over an extended period of time.
Despite its perfectly polished surface, the organic epidermis of the Large Torso (also referred to as the Minotaur) remains untouched by the time-induced cracks and irregularities of the wood. The monumental corpus of ebony, with minimal interventions, is reinforced by a secondary steel central square axis that fills the ancient oak trunk, aged for hundreds of years in the river. Enclosed within the volume, in the duality of the organic outer layer held by a cold metal geometric structure, lies the sculptor’s vision of art, which, through the high aestheticization of the constructive elements of his sculptures, allows for the coexistence of the mechanical and the organic; civilisation and nature.

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

Kata Mijatović, Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, 2010

Kata Mijatović
Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth, 2010
ink-jet photography
MG-8518

In August 2010, Croatian artist Kata Mijatović (1956) staged a performance at the plateau of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, which included Ivan Kožarić’s sculpture “The Shape of Space XIII”. The performance consisted of sleeping in Kožarić’s sculpture and lasted six hours, from midnight to dawn. The title of the performance is also a reference to Kožarić. In private situations, this celebrated Croatian sculptor actually called this sculpture “Earth, Sky”, thus suggesting that the entire visible world could somehow be treated as being between the sky and earth. The artist put this Kožarić’s metaphor into action, choosing the sculpture, as curator Branko Franceschi notes, “as a place where she will lay her makeshift bed and thus make her long-term work on the inclusion of unconscious human energies into the space of practical human existence, through symbolic artistic language, present within the great tradition of neo-avantgarde art.” The performance “Sleeping between the Sky and the Earth” symbolically marked the beginning of a period in which dreams, as well as the process of sleeping and dreaming, will occupy one of the key places in the artist’s work. Dreams will also determine her attitude towards society. Specifically, the artist sees dreaming as the process that is similar to artistic creation – “When we dream, we all become artists”, Kata Mijatović points out – so in a certain way she builds on the tradition of avant-garde calls for the democratization of art.
In 1981, Kata Mijatović graduated from the Faculty of Law in Osijek. From 1988 to 1991, she was a member of the informal art group “Močvara” (“Swamp”) in Beli Manastir. In 1991, she entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and in 1997, she obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From 2005 to 2019, she managed the AŽ Gallery in Zagreb. She received multiple awards for her work, and her works are part of prominent museum collections in Croatia. She lives and works in Zagreb.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo : from the National Museum of Modern Art's archives

Anabel Zanze, m (red), 2010

Anabel Zanze
m (red), 2010
oil on canvas
120 x 150 cm
MG-7299

Anabel Zanze (1971) is a prominent Croatian verbo-visual painter, a representative of a kind of visual lettrism. An artist who writes as she paints, and paints as she writes. The textual-visual form and refined aesthetics of the artist’s paintings require reading, in addition to visual insight. Text and image in a single creation are analogous to polarities, fillings and blanks, binary codes and labyrinths of image-letters on a complex background. The image field is open to free, aesthetic and mental-conceptual interpretations. With her gift for unobtrusive optical examination of the image field A. Zanze questions the visual peculiarities, laws and accents of her own intellectual painting. She graduated in 1996 from the Department of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of prof. A. Kuduz. She has staged several solo exhibitions, the most recent being: Text in Tension, Gliptotheque HAZU, Zagreb and Museum of Fine Arts, Split, 2019; Fifty-Eight Paintings, Vukovar Municipal Museum – Orangery Gallery, Vukovar, 2016; Grisailles, Radnička galerija, Zagreb, 2015 – 2016; Quotations, Museum of Modern Art, Dubrovnik, 2015; Types of Words, Museum of Contemporary Art – No Gallery, Zagreb, 2014. Painting approximately 130 letters in a textually layered line in the painting (m) red, 2010, the artist counted and coloured the letter m in red, as a concept that, in the polarities between the achromatic and the prevailing black, neutral font of the letters and the accented red m, spreads through the optical-hypnotic fractal beauty that vibrates the entire composition like an unpredictable chaotic attractor. The artist’s works can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Fine Arts in Split, Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik, Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek, and many other museums, private and corporate collections in Croatia and abroad.

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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