From 8th December 2022 to 29 January 2023, the National Museum of Modern Art presents a retrospective exhibition of the visual artist, art critic and theorist Željko Kipke, titled From Rhythm to The Exterminating Palace. The exhibition concept, which is divided into seven segments and set-up in seven rooms on the first floor of the Vranyczany Palace, and combines film, ambient installations, paintings, photographs and prints, was devised by the artist himself, and it comprises his anthological works created in the period from 1977 to 2022. In addition to the works from the NMMU Collection, several other Croatian museum institutions and private collectors have loaned artworks for this occasion. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue in Croatian and English languages with a foreword by art historian and curator Vanja Babić. The catalogue is designed by Ana Zubić.
From 26 January to 15 February 2023, the Eight Room – showcasing the artist’s previously unseen lithographs from the late 1970s, will be presented at the MH Gallery, as an extension of his retrospective at the NMMU.
(…) This is an artist in whose oeuvre the chronological order in which individual works were made is not always of crucial importance; once his ideas are realised, they do not necessarily stay anchored in the spatial and temporal contexts they originated in, but will often carry within them the potential of temporal fluctuations of sorts, and thus also revitalisations of meanings. The progenitors of building one’s own integral oeuvres as continuously
permuting wholes are, of course, found in the period of great historical avant-gardes, and Kipke is certainly one of the most authentic contemporary successors of precisely such creative strategies. (…)
Vanja Babić, excerpt from the text in the exhibition catalogue
The exhibition in seven stages (SEVEN ROOMS) is conceived in a non-linear time frame between two films realised in 2022 and 2021. From the six-minute El Palacio Exterminador to the film Rhythm II, a recently edited permutation of four Super 8s shot in 1980, along the route between the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Street of the City of Vukovar (then the Proletarian Brigades Street). Two ambiences are incorporated into the non-linear time frame, one from 1998 (Marseille Number Chant, FOURTH ROOM / IV) and the other from 1993 (Prayer Machines Chamber, SIXTH ROOM / II). They have dual functions, on the one hand, the two rooms are intermezzos, and on the other, they are links between different media strategies. The Cabinet is a “bridge” between the paintings from the late 1980s (THIRD ROOM / V) and much later films (for example Orson’s Direction Sign from 2015, THIRD ROOM / V), while the Number Chant is a “bridge” between film permutations (Rhythm II, FIRST ROOM / A) and structurally conceived paintings and prints from the late 1970s (SECOND ROOM / O). (…)
Željko Kipke
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Images from the exhibition set up / Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022