The exhibition History of Illness, Readings, Joy, Sorrow and Old Age – Metamorphoses by Manuela Vladić-Maštruko, curated by Marta Radman, head of the NMMU art collection from 1990 - present, opens on 2 June and presents the artist’s recent works to Zagreb’s cultural audience.
The artist’s book, which according to the curator holds a central place, appearing in the gallery space not simply as an object but as a structure that develops through drawings, objects, and video. It emerges from the artist’s longstanding practice at the junction of image and text, and from an impulse
to organise drawing into a form of intimate archiving.
(…) Viewed from the curatorial standpoint of a generation that inherited an art world already fluent in expanded media, archives, personal narrative, and fragmented visual languages, the work of Manuela Vladić-Maštruko is compelling precisely because it does not reach for such strategies as markers of contemporaneity, but arise from a long-standing need to preserve, structure, and render experience visible. What elsewhere tends to surface as the recognisable idiom of contemporary practice is, in her work, the fruit of continuity, perseverance, and personal imperative. Accordingly, drawing, the artist’s book, the object and video are not presented as separate or auxiliary media, but as organic continuations of a singular artistic vision. The exhibition does not attempt to create distance from the personal; instead, it reveals how personal experience can be articulated with clarity and precision, without collapsing into private anecdote. The intimate retains its inherent vulnerability, yet within the exhibition space it assumes the form of a carefully composed visual structure, accessible to the gaze of the other. – as Marta Radman writes in the accompanying catalogue essay.
The exhibition that has been made possible with financial support from the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb, will remain open at Josip Račić Gallery until June 28.
ARTIST'S BIOGRAPHY
Manuela Vladić-Maštruko was born in 1962. She obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1985, where she studied under Profes¬sor Ferdinand Kulmer. From the mid-1980s onwards she has exhibited regularly across the Croatian and interna¬tional art scene, with a body of exhibition work compris¬ing more than fifty solo and group shows. Her practice includes painting, drawing, illustration, the artist’s book, animation, installation, set design, and costume design, held together throughout by a consistent preoccupa¬tion with the relationship between image, narrative, personal record, and spatial context.
Beyond her exhibition practice, a considerable portion of her work is devoted to illustration, the picture book, multimedia projects, and arts education. As both author and illustrator, she has produced fifteen original picture books, and in 1995 established Mela, a fine arts studio for children and young people. In 2014 she founded the Arte Insula Association for Intercultural Dialogue. Her work as an artist and illustrator has earned her a wide range of awards and distinctions, among them the Grigor Vitez Award, Ovca u kutiji, the IBBY Honour List, the Supertoon Festival Award, recognition at the Croatian Biennial of Illustration, and the iJungle Illus¬tration Award. She is a member of the Croatian Fine Artists’ Association, the Croatian Writers’ Society, and the Croatian Association of Researchers of Children’s Literature. She lives and works in Zadar.
Images: Manuela Vladić-Maštruko, from the Artist’s book, 2024. – 2026. / Photo Manuela Vladić-Maštruko