Vladimir Gašparić Gapa
Small Sun Chariot, 1987
bronze
28 x 30 x 55.5 cm
MG-5986
Vladimir Gašparić Gapa graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1975, in the class of Valerije Michieli. After graduation, he worked in Ivan Sabolić’s Master Workshop, and since 2003 he has been a lecturer at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts. He spent time studying in Italy, Germany, Sweden and Austria.
Initially, he created expressive figurative art, but he was recognized as an author of abstract sculptures executed in wood, bronze and granite, with symbolic content and expressive power. He creates reductive and expressive works with playful geometric structures, dynamic forms and unusual relationships between elements. He produces analytical and constructivist works in series, examining and perfecting new forms and expressions. He shapes clear constructive complexes of open structures characterized by wood carving techniques and elements. The rustic quality and carving are replaced in newer works by the smoothed and polished surfaces rendered in granite, while the sculptural style has been adapted to the characteristics of the material.
The sculpture, poetically titled a Small Sun Chariot, has a constructivist morphology and is composed of two relatively narrow, separately formed elements connected into a single dynamic surface of balanced correlations.
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