Zlatan Vrkljan
(1955)
National Museum of Modern Art (a triptych), 1995
oil on canvas, 130×98 cm (x3)
Zlatan Vrkljan (1955) is a postmodernist of what is referred to as pure perception who treats paintings as material, morphological and illusionist facts. Vrkljan’s painting has absorbed the Avant-Garde, the tradition of both Croatia’s and global Modernism, and High Modernism. He graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1979 in the class of Šime Perić, and worked as an associate at Ljubo Ivančić and Nikola Reiser’s Master Workshop until 1981. He attracted the attention of both audiences and critics already with his first exhibition (Skyscrapers, 1978). He is an original painter who respects tradition, but also creates beyond it like a nomad painter. In the mid-1980s he painted mythological and allegorical themes, after which he gradually rid his palette of colour accents and moved towards monochrome painting (Black Paintings of the 1990s). Vrkljan’s oeuvre has to date been at the crossroads of Figurative and Abstract Art. Being a paraphrase of Ljubo Ivančić’s nudes, Zlatan Vrkljan’s achromatic National Museum of Modern Art triptych from 1995 was mounted between 2005 and 2020 in the stairway of the National Museum of Modern Art, formerly the entrance hall of the palace, and is intended to be a tribute to and the emblem of the National Museum of Modern Art. The triptych features a dynamic perspective, monumental motifs, and both expressive and non-expressive figurative stylisation. Zlatan Vrkljan has been a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2014 and a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. During the forty or so years of his career as an artist, he has exhibited at numerous solo exhibitions in both Croatia and abroad (Zagreb, Paris, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Sarajevo, Ljubljana). He represented Croatia at the 7th International Cairo Biennale in 1998 and the Venice Biennale in 1999.
Text: Željko Marciuš, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb