Izvor Pende
Dedicated to the sunny side of the street, 2018
oil on canvas
240 x 180 cm
MG-8515
Izvor Pende (1976) is an international post-modern experimenter at a protean boundary and link between the concrete and the abstract, which he transforms into pure abstraction that has nothing to do with historic abstract tendencies and High Modernism, but is extracted from the artist’s representational, figurative projection of the image. It is gradually distinguished into formal-colouristic abstraction. After having attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb for two years, he continued to study painting at the Kunstakdemie in Düsseldorf, where he obtained a master’s degree in 2005 in the class of K. Rissa. At the same Academy, he won his first painting award in 2002, which marked the beginning of his career as an artist. Since 2003, he has been showing his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Bonn, Munich, Hannover, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Chicago and Eupen in Belgium. In 2008, he exhibited at BAT, Campus Galerie, Bayreuth, and in 2010 he held his first solo exhibition at the Barrel Gallery of the Croatian Fine Artists’ Association (HDLU). This marks the beginning of the true valorisation of the artist’s figurative expression in Croatia, in a specific combination of figuration and monochrome painting: motifs of nature, landscapes and Dubrovnik vedutas (paraphrase, B. Franceschi). In Croatia, this has also been confirmed at exhibitions in the Art Workshop Lazareti (2010), Gliptotheque HAZU (2011) and the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik (2014). With D. Richter, he presented a series of abstract works at the Art Workshop Lazareti in Dubrovnik (2016), and such an expression then took him all the way to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (2018). The painting with an indicative title Dedicated to the sunny side of the street from 2018, is based on a palette of distinct colouristic dabs realised in the formal organisation of space, surfaces and abstracted forms attuned to the balance between spatial depths and flat surfaces and soft, pliable expressive abstraction of forms curved in multiple directions. Izvor Pende has received multiple awards for his work (BAT Award, 2008), an in 2022, the NMMU staged his latest monographic exhibition Response. His works are part of numerous museum and gallery 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: Boris Berc © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb