Goran Vranić
Venice, 2009
(from the series Poetics of the Captured Lens)
color photograph, 50 × 70 cm
MG-8147
Goran Vranić (b. 1964) graduated from the Photography Department of the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb in 1983. His entire professional career has been closely connected with museums. From 1987 to 1996 he worked as Head of the Photographic Studio at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, and since then he has collaborated with prominent art historians and museum institutions on the production of exhibition catalogues and monographs. He has exhibited his artistic photographs in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has been a member of ULUPUH since 1993.
The series of eighteen photographs by Goran Vranić (b. 1964), Venice, 2009 (from the cycle Poetics of the Captured Lens), preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art, is particularly compelling. Through displaced framings of cropped fragments of contemporary (tourist) life in the mythical city—seen through the blurred outlines of iron railings in the foreground (like a prison or dungeon window framing the false charm of a genre scene of embellished realism)—the artist emphasizes motifs of kitsch and camp aesthetics, as well as the army of anonymous labor within the service sector, such as waitstaff and cleaners, operating in the background of this spectacle. Vranić’s series speaks of the banalization of a powerful myth through its mass consumption in contemporary consumer society, which tends to linger on the superficial, flat impression and rapid consumption, sparing not even the mythical city of Venice.
Text: Ivana Rončević Elezović, PhD, Museum advisor at the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić / National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb