Josip Butković
COURTYARDS
Prsten Gallery
March 9 – April 10, 2016

Exhibition opening: Wednesday, March 9, 2016 at 7pm

…With this cycle Josip Butković made a specific and valuable contribution to the issue of a complex relationship between culture as an essentially human activity and nature, seen as the totality of everything that surrounds us, which is not the work of human hands. He conceived his artistic, and inextricably linked civilisation paradigm, at the time when our civilisation, trying to solve the accumulated environmental problems through a positive approach, gradually turns from the anthropocentric view of the world towards worldviews that, from different aspects, imply the equivalence of living creatures, such as zoocentrism, biocentrism or ecocentrism. What they all have in common is that they extend the question of value and ethical principles to the world around the human race; to animals, all living beings or environmental sustainability, aiming for an eco-humanist approach to reality as the only way for the sustainability of life on Earth. In the last Josip Butković’s series the natural world is an equal co-creator. The printmaking technology, developed for centuries, is the medium of recording its secrecy, unpredictability and elusiveness. New pages of the human understanding of the world around us have been written in relief printing, and Josip Butković, who shapes and treats the selected art discipline in line with a higher worldview principle, distinguishes himself as a full-blooded representative of post-conceptual art that sees the cognitive and ethical aspects of the practice as important, if not decisive factors of work in the aesthetic domain.

From preface by Branko Franceschi

Artist Biography

JOSIP BUTKOVIĆ was born in Rijeka, Croatia, in 1950. He graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 1980. In 1983 Josip completed postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Since 1980 he has worked at the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Teacher Education in Rijeka, first as an assistant, and then as a docent and associate professor. He has been a Vice-Dean for Education, Faculty of Teacher Education in Rijeka, since 1989. In 1997 he was first appointed as full professor, and in 2003 as a full professor with tenure. From 1995 to 1997 he was the Chair of the Graphic Arts and Drawing Section of the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka, and from 1997 to 2000 the Head of the Department. Since 2004 he has worked as an associate at the Academy of Arts, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek. He was also a mentor-professor at the postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. He is a full professor of graphic arts at the Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka and was the Chair of the Graphic Arts Section from 2006 to 2008. Since 2013 he has been the Dean of the Academy of Applied Arts. He is a member of the Croatian Association of Arts, Zagreb.

The exhibition is financially supported by the City Office for Culture, Education and Sports Zagreb and by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic Croatia.

WORKING HOURS
Wednesday to Friday 11am – 7pm
Saturday and Sunday 10am – 6pm

Mondays and holidays – closed
Dom hrvatskih likovnih umjetnika
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb