Ivica Malčić
Passion, 1992
oil on board
51 x 66.5 cm
MG-6508
Ivica Malčić is the most prominent Croatian painter of the so-called bad painting. Working in the traditional media of painting and drawing, his own original expression is based on raw iconicity, immediacy, conceptual image, free gesture, painting-collage, verbo-visuality, anti-academicism and fierce criticism of kitsch and bad art, which he refutes precisely with bad painting. The conceptual nature of Malčić’s work is manifested in his daily visits to the studio and his painting work. As early as the mid-1990s, he introduced the concept of exhibiting a series of one hundred small-format paintings, which he combined into painting installations (One Hundred Unexhibited Paintings / October 1991 – August 1995, 1995; ibid. 1998). He creates authentic paintings based on the principle of revealing his own life, fierce criticism of the worlds of art or the cumbersome reality. From 2006, he has been creating diary drawings and collages in which he establishes quotes from popular culture, drawing awareness to the intimate in a self-ironic manner. From early on in his career, he has been painting argumentative paintings criticising the petty bourgeoisie, the art market and cultural institutions (Never a Commodity, 2000, Never Mind Dimitrije…, 2005), and since 2014 he has been creating the realistic-critical series Obituaries based on newspaper photography. In the painting Passion, Malčić demystifies the purist taboo of sexuality by portraying a naturalistic sexual relationship between two dogs, stripped down to their raw nature and animalistic brutality. Numerous references can be drawn from this.
He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1996 (Miroslav Šutej). He regularly exhibits in Croatia, and his paintings are also housed in the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, where he, alongside Zoran Pavelić, held a problematic verbo-visual exhibition titled Concept of Image – Image of Concept featuring the theme of Obituaries in 2022.
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