PETRA GROZAJ
Moments in Time

Opening of the exhibition on December 3rd 2013 at 7 pm
3.12. – 15.12.2013.

Barrel Gallery

Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb

Working hours:

Wednesday – Friday  11 am – 7 pm
Saturday and Sunday 10 am  – 6 pm
Closed on Monday, Tuesday and holiday.

Moments in Time

From its beginnings at the Academy of Fine Arts, Petra Grozaj’s painting has undoubtedly borne a strong self-referential and introspective mark which has always gone back much deeper than the classical intimate repertoire of themes and motifs. Self-analysis, presented through a systematically elaborated idea of ​​the so-called painting journal/diary in pictures, occurred through the motif of the face of the author, in which her emotional, psychological and existential situation could very delicately be traced. The specific – often cold – coloring of the paintings spoke in support of the process of inner purification of clusters of the outside world and experience, suggesting at times an isolated, solitary atmosphere. However, her own face, at which the artist was staring so closely, we recognized as a signal of the establishment of identity, which nobody can deny, just as we are surprised by everything that is sometimes hidden in us under perfectly controlled facial features.
The thematic shift that occurred with the new cycle of paintings will not greatly surprise the careful experts of the oeuvre of this talented artist. If in the current paintings Petra Grozaj partly metaphorically rejected other people’s energy, restlessness and daily frequency of contamination, she is now focused on a very specific kind of impact to which we are exposed through childhood, in the process of growing up and later throughout life. Recently masks have appeared in the works of several contemporary Croatian artists, for example Matko Vekić and Pavle Pavlović, carrying a certain amount of social criticism of contemporary alienated and predatory society. They indicate the loss and deletion of a human identity, of a tired people who are looking for some other fictitious identities outside the triangle of job-fridge-TV, or are simply assigned to different subcultural phenomena. Petra Grozaj’s paintings, in this context, do not speak of social decadence and the civilizational decline of human beings, but are still facing individual emotional and psychological processes.

Iva Körbler

Petra Grozaj graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and from the School for Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb. She is the winner of the Rector’s Award of the University of Zagreb and Academy of Fine Arts Award. She exhibited on 15 solo and 50 group exhibitions in country and abroad. She represented Croatia at the Biennale of Young Artists  BJCEM in Naples. She participated at residential programs in Venice, Naples, Paris, Berlin and Leipzig. Her works are placed in private and gallery collections. She is a member of HDLU and HZSU. She lives and works in Zagreb.
www.petragrozaj.net