Roberta Vilić

TIMELINE

Karas Gallery

October 02nd – 11th 2015

Opening of the exhibition on 02nd of October at 7pm

The works of Roberta Vilić have developed in the context of the appropriation of Art Informel, by emphasizing the materiality of the painting surface, treating the matter as an associative subjective field. Diagrams and traces, signs, cuts, letters, emerge from the structure or disappear from it within this rebus of associations.

With this new exhibition, Roberta brings a slight change from the usual visual code and her own artistic practice. Her new cycles of works, titled “Odgađanje“ (“Procrastination“) and “Pravda i ne“ (“Justice and not“), represent a refined space of the painting, a more complex use of words and sentences, which the author treats as a graphic matrix. The monochrome surface / background contains typographic elements, and she also uses the verses from Fernando Pessoa’s poem “Procrastination“, whereas the main content is focused on the meaning of the written text. Media landscape that surrounds us is swamped with various messages and imperatives of everyday life, and by quoting Fernando Pessoa’s poetry, that is, fragments from the poem “Procrastination“, Roberta gives us a reminder in which, in the repetitions of fragmented words, we read “the day after tomorrow“…

– The day after tomorrow, yes, only the day after tomorrow …
Tomorrow I’ll start thinking about the day after tomorrow…

On the one hand, stylization of typography suggests an impersonal character, mechanical origin of the material; however, this intervening hand is the trace of the artist’s presence. Reduced dark-coloured compositions, almost monochrome, address the void, turn the relation between positive and negative upside down, take shape through the conceptualization of methods of reduction and repetition, while in this uniform repetitiveness, rhythm and change are brought by minimal and discrete shifts and graphic contrasts. Along these lines, Iva Korbler notices how “The layers of the matter we pick up from her paintings – as well as the latent tendency towards graphic elements of scene design – suggest a complex understanding and feeling of reality, but also the need to establish order and balance“.     

From the preface of Branka Benčić

Roberta Vilić was born in 1971. She graduated from the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb, and then from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1998, in the class of Prof Zlatko Keser. Since 1992 she has exhibited at more than 20 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in Croatia, Slovenia, Italy and Germany. She has won three awards for painting and certificates of merit for graphics. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists and Croatian Freelance Artists Association.    

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.

 Karas Gallery

Praška 4, 10000 Zagreb

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