Stipan Tadić and Ivona Jurić

LIFE AND STILL LIFE

Karas Gallery

September 17th – 27th 2015

Opening of the exhibition on 17th of September at 8pm

Stipan Tadić filled 12 pages with the images of 33 dead animals and thus showed all the things man does to nature, heartlessly, brutally and without thinking about consequences; things we usually do not see, things we have to be reminded of. Beautiful nature landscapes of the countries he visited on his bike are in direct opposition to the very exact, almost encyclopaedic drawings of animal carcasses and their glistening innards. They show the environment in which man has never specifically intervened, the landscape that has remained amazingly beautiful despite being surrounded by Homo sapiens.    

It is not to say that nature is good and technology and progress are bad, such thinking is naive, stupid and flat. Man only speeds up what nature does anyway, serves as a catalyst, but these processes are sometimes so accelerated that the initial settings become blurred and default systems turn upside down, however, for the poor bunny it makes no difference whether its furry life ended in fox’s jaws or under the car wheels, the final result is the same. The only difference is that in the latter case the fox remained hungry.    

From the preface by Andrija Škare

One night there was a fire in front of the studio where Ivona Jurić paints. When she entered the yard in the morning, she saw things scattered outside the door, a wounded environment. Each thing was bitten by flame, things were lying around like they were spat out, red-hot and then burnt, broken and crumpled. In the time that passed things were in their places, marked by man, inserted in nature like flags in a moist soil. Is this really what we saw? Was that the true nature of those things? Every time we set off, we believe that we know where we are. However, after the fire, the place seems different. We do not grieve for the past. We are not interested in tragedy. It is inevitable. We are not interested in how the fire burns. Its nature is elusive. Now, after the fire was put out, the time has unfolded the nod of events and the change is obvious, we are at the fire site, looking only into ourselves.  We might ask ourselves where were we, what did we have and what had us. We are curious about the beauty of disorder and, even more, what will grow out of it. Our “always“ is now a completely new scene and it is shaking us by the shoulders, waking us up, making us understand. Ivona Jurić takes the brush and grows grass and leaves at the scene, paints it green. She is looking for an eternal vibration – she pushes things into darkness and then pulls them out into the light, makes them change.

From the preface by Korana Serdarević

The exhibition is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic Croatia and by the City Office for Culture, Education and Sports Zagreb as the annual award of HDLU for the best young artists in 2013.

Karas Gallery

Praška 4, 10000 Zagreb

Working hours: Tuesday to Friday 11 am – 7 pm, Saturday and Sunday 10 am – 2 pm