Petar Barišić
(1954)
Object-Relief, 1997
painted wood
156 x 174 x 61 cm
MG-6496
Petar Barišić obtained a degree in sculpture from the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts (I. Sabolić) in 1978, where he has been teaching since 2002. He was an associate in Frano Kršinić’s Master Workshop until 1981. A number of his sculptures and spatial installations have been installed in public spaces at home and abroad.
He has created a dynamic sculptural oeuvre, constantly challenging comprehensive spatial and formal correlations. He created variously conceived sculptures with avant-garde constructive aspirations. In earlier cycles, he modelled wooden and bronze biomorphic units, composed of several elements, deepening the spatial and mental conception of sculptural work (Wooden Sonata III, 1989). He then makes geometric ambient installations from wood, stainless steel, plexiglass and highly polished aluminium.
In the mid-1990s, the sculptor became preoccupied with relief, as a challenging flat surface, and he intuitively used the cubist practice of collage as his starting point, that is, he built dynamic spatial elements on a rectangular base with a dominant minimalist execution in wood and in a monochrome white colourway. Barišić’s remarkable series of Objects-Reliefs with a neutral surface and intersecting elegant spatial protrusions in different directions and angles that dynamize, with their shadows, the experience of space and the spiritual perception of forms, is the product of such considerations of the relationships between the static and the dynamic through a refined play of forms.
Text: Tatijana Gareljić, 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
