NEVENKA ARBANAS

LEAVES

BAČVA GALLERY

October 12. – 23, 2016

Exhibition opening on Wednesday, October 12, 2016 at 7pm

 

THE RAIN OF LEAVES

Nevenka Arbanas’s exhibition at the Croatian Association of Artists marks a new step forward in exploring the possibilities of her artistic expression within the series of works called Leaves. In 2010, with this series and using her distinctive handwriting, Arbanas opened up a period of new ways of thinking about her artistic approach. From that moment on, through a number of exhibitions and portfolios, she has been systematically exploring the possibilities and expanding the syntax of her newfound grammar.

Adapting to the space of Bačva Gallery, Arbanas creates an environment made of Leaves printed on free-hanging, oversized paper rolls, which follow the circular shape of the gallery’s exterior walls. In this way the traditionally printed graphics, meant to be viewed from both sides, takes on the characteristics of a sculpture that needs to be seen from all angles. These exhibits, however, were not meant to be viewed separately, but as a whole and in interaction with the surrounding space in which they are located. Graphic prints on oversized paper sheets hanging in the gallery space and “pouring down“ the floor are not a novelty in Nevenka Arbanas’s exhibitions; the construction of environment with paper sheets first began in 2010, with the first exhibition of the series in Račić Studio. However, the animation of “sheets[1] (leaves)“ in a free, slow fall, in the centre of the circular gallery space, introduces a new element into the artist’s exhibition practice. The slow pace of the fall of a minimalist animation transfers and displaces the compositions of prints produced using traditional printmaking techniques into some new media. These traditional printmaking techniques, which preceded the animation, now surround it symbolically in a meaningful synthesis. The word leaf (sheet)[2] is used in quotes because we are dealing with deliberately imperfect prints of real leaves, devoid of their local colour, but also with abstracted forms which only remind one of the same, balancing thus on the border of figuration towards abstract. Besides, as I have explained many times, the term leaf (sheet) in Nevenka Arbanas’s repertoire deliberately plays on the ambivalence of meaning between a concrete plant motif and consequentially an element of nature, on the one hand, and a technical term for graphic sheet as a symbol of the artist’s “craft“, on the other.

Monumental, fluid unit of the environment is characterized by the minimalism of the formal composition, whereas its semantic texture is expanded with “a complementary contrast“ of tangible, concrete paper medium having a virtual nature and dynamics of animation. With this, we dare to say, successful experiment, Arbanas suggests the direction of her future artistic explorations, which could put the term graphic in quotation marks when describing her opus (in a traditional sense of the word), just like with the word “leaf“.

Ivana Rončević Elezović

[1] Croatian language uses the same word for “sheet“ and “leaf“, i.e. “list“, allowing for a play of words between these two terms, i.e. the meaning they describe, TN
[2] The actual word used is “sheet“, but to make the meaning more similar to the original version of the text, I used “leaf“ instead, TN

Nevenka Arbanas, academic painter and graphic artists, was born in 1950 in Batina. She graduated from the graphic art department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Prof. Albert Kinert in 1975. She attended the four semester postgraduate study program at the same Academy and holds the title Master of Arts in Graphic Art. Since 1975, she has exhibited her art in 44 solo exhibitions, as well as participated in over 200 juried group exhibitions and curatorial concepts both in Croatia and worldwide. She holds numerous art awards. She is a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.

 

The realization of the exhibition was financially supported by the City Office for Education, Culture and Sports of Zagreb.

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