Category: Exhibitions
16 October 2018
Despite the Environment
Exhibition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the HDLU and 80 years since the construction of the Home of HDLU
October 26, 2018 – December 2, 2018
Exhibition opening: Friday, October 26, 2018. at 8pm at the Home of HDLU
In 2018, HDLU, today’s largest and oldest art association, gathering over 1,900 art and multimedia artists from all over Croatia, will mark 150 years of existence, as well as the 80th anniversary of the construction of the Home of HDLU, as imagined by Ivan Meštrović, once also the President of the Association.
In marking these important jubilee anniversaries, HDLU issues a monograph 150 years of HDLU, organized lectures and round tables, and organizes a group exhibition. Curatorial concept Despite the Environment (written by esteemed art historian and curator Branko Franceschi) was chosen for the exhibition.
This 150th jubilee of HDLU activity is extremely important for the entire Croatian culture and art, because through history of HDLU, one can see the whole history of Croatian modern and contemporary art.
The exhibition consists of around 60 art works (loaned from various institutions throughout Croatia and private collections) done by members of HDLU, created throughout the history of the Association and in all types of media. The aim of the exhibition is to mark and promote the long-standing role of HDLU in the artistic, cultural and social life of Croatia; to present iconic works of art that shape recent Croatian art history; and to make a critical resume of artistic creativity in Croatia in the past 150 years.
Patrons of the program of marking the jubilee of HDLU activity are the President of the Republic of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar Kitarović and the Mayor of the City of Zagreb, Milan Bandić.
“(…)The presented works of art sublimate the time and context of their origin, so they anchored themselves in the collective or at least the subjective curator’s memory as the ideal image of the period of their emergence. These works have proved as an intriguing and inspiring reflection or a comment about the reference social reality, i.e., through their form or content they represented a deviation in relation to the promoted aesthetic and social values, and through superior examples constituted a foretoken of times yet to come. Their existence testifies about the pioneering role of artists in creating an image of their own time and articulating guidelines for the future. Starting with putting up “The History of Croats“ by Ivan Meštrović (1932) at the pavilion centre, i.e. the present Bačva Gallery, in remembrance of the first exhibition of the members of the Association at the Home of the Croatian Association of Artists, along with an inherent symbolism of exhibiting the sculpture, the other selected works will follow the circular architecture of the space and will ultimately fill it out in a kind of a visual paraphrase of a musical score.”
Branko Franceschi, curator of the exhibition
You can read more about the concept here.
Organizer:
Co-organizer:
Patrons of the exhibition:
Sponsors:
Media Sponsors:
WORKING HOURS:
Wednesday to Friday: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 AM – 18.00 PM
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays (November 1st).
The exhibition will remain open until December 2, 2018
10 October 2018
DUJE MEDIĆ
OUR MOTHER THE MOUNTAIN
Karas Gallery
October 16 – October 28, 2018
Opening of the exhibition: Tuesday, October 16 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery
Exhibition Our Mother the Mountain, by Duje Medić will be opened on Tuesday, October 16 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58).
“From one drawing to another, from one series to the other, Duje Medić is an increasingly intriguing and delightful artist. Many contemporary drawers succeed in fixating our gaze on their works, but few are those from whose graphite dust one can read poetry and prose, and all the drama of an era, of one human being. What are stories without sound, without color or smell? They are mute, in all shades of gray, with all aroma gone. Yet they are not…
Medić is the drawer and narrator of melancholy, nostalgia, homeland… He is a great fan of material and intangible folk treasures, a young erudite who is constantly learning and than transmitting, sharing, recounting, preserving and reinterpreting. By using his pen, he is inscribing depth into the thin layers of paper. When they become dense, darker than the night, ruled by Šorko, local devil from Brela, they are transformed into heavy, monolithic and three-dimensional sculptures that threaten in silence.
(…)
Traces of Duje´s pencil becomes more solid with age. Spidery and soft creations are present but do not prevail. Duje is one of the few pencil masters who use this fragile tool to create three-dimensional, sculptural characters. Now, when they tell their stories so clearly and unambiguously, Medić can be classified as a new generation of storytellers. Is it true, is it historically grounded, is it accurate…? Who would care about that when stories from the mountain reach our mind and soul? Stories that occupy the whole being, allowing us to forget all worries and pain. Duje´s Brela stories are a new return to the old world we are consciously or unconsciously tied to.”
From preface, written by Anita Ruso
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Duje Medić was born in 1986 in Makarska. In 2010 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Professor Nevenka Arbanas at the Department of Graphic Arts. He is a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association (HZSU).
He exhibited in 15 solo and many group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. He is one of the authors of Ex Libris, a group collection of graphic prints published by the National and University Library in Zagreb, as well as an independent collection of graphic prints To Cain’s Tribe. In 2016 he was awarded an artist residency at Cité International des Arts in Paris.
www.dujemedic.com
Supported by:
The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).
Working hours:
Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.
The exhibition will remain open until September 28, 2018
26 September 2018
IVAN MARKOVIĆ
ANTISTRESS MIX
Karas Gallery
October 2 – October 14, 2018
Opening of the exhibition: Tuesday, October 2 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery
Exhibition Antistress Mix, by Ivan Marković will be opened on Tuesday, October 2 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58).
“Antistress Mix, Ivan Marković’s sixth exhibition functions on two levels. Primarly, it is his personal hommage to 1950s american painting, which he cites as foremost influence on his work.
At the same time, the artist would call this exhibition as return to himself. Monocormatic surfaces, big dimensions and simultaneous absence of big ideas and even bigger pretensions are his both old and new aspirations which – depending of willingness to listen to oneself more then the demands of others – he eagerly and oftenly revisits. But this time at his bravest and one might say – most radical. This time the artist creats with lesser feeling of obligation than before, unburdened even with his own childhood (“No Name“, Golden Angel, Varazdin) – allowing himself to name the exhibition after essential oil that he “accidentaly” found in his atelier. He acquired this name, with no reservations towards banality and at the same time with no ironic distance, as appropriate for his work.
Playing with collage, which preceeded the creation of paintings, writes playfullness, simplicity and childlike freedom into this exhibition, which is something very much new for the artist and coming as a result of already mentioned coming to terms with personal childhood. That novelty could be puer aeternus of the author.”
Supported by:
The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).
Working hours:
Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.
The exhibition will remain open until October 14, 2018
14 September 2018
IRENA FRANTAL
DE-/+CONSTRUCTION
Karas Gallery
September 18 – September 30, 2018
On Tuesday, September 18, 2018, from 11:00 to 19:00 at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58) you can attend the process of putting up the exhibition by Irena Frantal, called De -/+ construction.
De -/+ construction is an exhibition by Irena Frantal who deals with the boundaries/or lack of them in media (in her case, the media of the book). The artist will build an exhibition at the Karas Gallery on September 18 from 11 am to 7 pm and from the moment she enters the empty gallery, the exhibition exists. Formal opening – sharp boundaries of the media: exhibition – do not exist.
The last day of the exhibition, September 30, the artist will intervene in her work by moving parts and extinguishing/cleaning up the physical part of the work. You are invited to participate in the process from 10 am to 1 pm.
“Dieter Roth did his own Copley Book in collaboration with Richard Hamilton, giving him instructions in the letters he sent from Iceland to London. When the print shop lost one of his drawings, Roth included in the book a letter of apology from the print shop and a description of the drawing. Copley Books are unbound papers of various dimensions in one box. They tell about the process of making books – these books. As a spiral, at the same time constantly spreading, but also confined to itself.
De-/+construction is a work, developed in situ. It’s a book that intertwines its space with the gallery space. Layers of elements (pages; paper residues, created by cutting page edges; folds, created by page browsing; hidden parts; photographs; drawing; text; letters, left out of text cutting; text sketches; bindings; binding materials and covers; tools; text silhouettes; erased text; letter templates…) create an installation that is fluent, soft and changeable. By constantly reading it and by page browsing, it is changing. The observer/ reader’s touch is needed to keep the book alive, and so the viewer – observer/reader is invited to read/browse through pages and parts of this book/exhibition. Some of the questions I ask myself in this work are: Where is the limit/end of the work/book? At what moment does the text begin? Is one part/fragment at the same time a whole?
And finally, is (any) book also an exhibition?”
Irena Frantal
Irena Frantal is a visual artist from Zagreb. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and specialized in the art of the book (MA Book Art) at the University of the Arts in London. In her art practice she explores the media of the book. She collaborates with artists of various profiles on projects that use the book medium. She is the author of a series of Book Art Session workshops.
Contact: irenafrantal@yahoo.co.uk
Supported by:
The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).
Working hours:
Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.
The exhibition will remain open until September 30, 2018
05 September 2018
JELENA KOVAČEVIĆ
POLYNOMIAL
Public presentation of the artwork – doctoral thesis at the postgraduate university study in Painting, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb
Bačva Gallery, Home of HDLU
September 12 – September 23, 2018
Opening of the exhibition: Wednesday, September 12 at 8pm at the Home of HDLU
Exhibition Polynomial, by Jelena Kovačević will be opened on Wednesday, September 12 at 8pm at the Home of HDLU (Trg žrtava fašizma 16, Zagreb).
ARTIST STATEMENT
The exhibition Polynomial was created as part of postgraduate study in painting at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, under the mentorship of Prof. Ante Rašić and Prof. Vera Turković. Polynomial is thus a part of a future doctoral thesis, divided according to the periods in which it was created. Chronologically, the development of the idea was shown in the following way:
1: Ten drawings (2016)
I use drawings to explore and portray the states characterized by the presence of several contradictory emotions. Characters in interiors and exteriors reflect the internal turmoil.
2: Selection of photographs to be shown in large format (2017)
In this part I exhibited all the photographs I had used while preparing the exhibition. I put myself in the role of a detective and recorder of family events using photographs, without helpers and witnesses, and I created new documentation that will one day be seen as an isolated moment in the past.
3: Sketches and a visual diary (2017)
In the Polynomial drawing, the backbone of the entire exhibition, I create a juxtaposition of the four selected characters and deliberate upon the positions that belong to them within the frame. After defining the format I started working on two smaller format sketches in which the initial idea underwent certain changes. I simultaneously kept a visual diary to relieve from responsibility imposed on a work of art at an exhibition.
4: Polynomial drawing (2017) and analysis of the drawing (2018)
Five characters are the protagonists of the story: four females and one animal in the background. The invisible action takes place in a non-existent space. Through an atelier exhibition and by providing an insight into my notes, I am saying goodbye to my years-long work.
Jelena Kovačević
Organizer:
Supported by:
WORKING HOURS:
Wednesday to Friday: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 AM – 18.00 PM
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays (August 15).
The exhibition will remain open until September 23, 2018
28 August 2018
Glorija Lizde
F 20.5
PM Gallery
September 4 – 9, 2018
When presenting the history of a family, the photographic medium is very often, because of its skilful flirting with documentarism, perceived as a testimony of time. At the same time, the element of a positive self-presentation on depictions of moments of staged family idyll is being (inadvertently) disregarded.
This is precisely the starting point for artist Glorija Lizde’s reflections. She asks herself
whether it is possible to retrospectively examine difficult, repressed and unrecorded fragments of time related to a certain family. However, before plunging into past moments, the author carries out extensive research on her father’s illness, which marked the growing up of his three daughters. The illness is referred to as F20.5, a cold medical code for residual schizophrenia.
After that, she places the same three female protagonists into staged reinterpretations of father’s hallucinations, which, by taking on performative character, have a therapeutic effect on places of repressed family memories. In so doing, the artist uses the capacity of photography for resemantization of thinned memories, and she divides the final series into three segments: unified portraits of the three sisters and performances of father’s
hallucinations which intertwine with depictions of still life. Thus she expands the story about father’s inner antagonisms through other family members who are determined by them, at the same time synthesizing multiple views of “one reality”.
We recognize duality, as a guiding principle in the art process, in the dichotomy between dynamic and calming, achieved by interaction between light and shadow; by emphasizing clear, sharp colours with inscribed symbolism (such as red which is associated with life-death, love-war dualities); repeating geometrized motifs; while on the other hand calming landscapes hint at the final state of mental order, closing the circle.
Duality is also present on the conceptual level because the artist uses photography as a tool for introspection but at the same time, she skilfully plays with it in representation, by
manipulating framing, omitting content, alternating subjects and clear context, which results in the loss of connection between hallucination and interpretation. This creates a fertile ground for inscribing different meanings. Therefore, she translates the feeling of apparent closeness and almost voyeuristic prying into the intimacy of a family, exposed on gallery walls, into the structures of some other, more universal reality, which requires facing the past for a better present.
Suported by:
27 August 2018
TIHOMIR MATIJEVIĆ
PLATO WATCHES THE SIMPSONS
Karas Gallery
September 4 – September 16, 2018
Opening of the exhibition: Tuesday, September 4 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery
Exhibition Plato Watches the Simpsons, by Tihomir Matijević will be opened on Tuesday, September 4 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58).
“(…) Mourning for the lost “spiritual model“ is also increasingly visible in visual arts, and thus the Osijek-based sculptor Tihomir Matijević, in his work indicatively titled “Plato Watches the Simpsons“, reached for the global model of cartoon-behaviourism in which the memory of the days of belonging to someone and something still seems alive. It is an installation consisting of a white polyester sculpture (family portrait od The Simpsons), wooden construction as a simulation of a family home and scattered (edible) popcorn on the floor of specified space (the popcorn itself could be a great representation of ravenous gulping of cognitive snacks that do not fill the human void, or in Wittgenstein’s words – they represent the impossibility to technically solve fundamental life problems).
(…) Behind the mask of pseudo portraying, the strong indication of Memento Mori construction could not remain hidden. Since the animations as models simply do not have their own internalities or personal secrets, they could not be turned into portraits. (True portraits require a reciprocal “transfer of internalities“ between persons open in their freedom)[1]. However, the (non-)mastering of subconscious or unconscious projections of one’s own internality into inanimate things (animated Simpsons) could surely achieve what we call the artist’s self-portrait, so if Plato is truly “watching“ someone in the describes installation, it is the artist Tihomir Matijević.”
From preface, written by Zlatko Kozina
[1] Schillebeeckx, Edward. H. Krist, sakremenat susreta s Bogom [Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter With God]. Zagreb. Kršćanska sadašnjost, 1992, p.5.
Supported by:
The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).
Working hours:
Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.
The exhibition will remain open until September 16, 2018
WORKING HOURS PRSTEN GALLERY, BAČVA GALLERY AND PM GALLERY (Home of HDLU)
Wednesday - Friday: 11am - 7pm h
Saturday and Sunday 10am - 6pm h
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays closed
WORKING HOURS GALLERY KARAS
Wednesday and Friday: 9am - 3pm h Thursday: 3pm - 7pm h Saturday and Sunday: 9am - 12am h Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays closedHome of HDLU
Trg žrtava fašizma 16, Zagreb, Map...
T + 385 (0) 1 46 11 818, 46 11 819 F + 385 (0) 1 45 76 831 E-mail: info@hdlu.hr
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