Admir Mujkić

Floating Worlds

19.5. – 5.6.

Exhibition opening: 19.5.2016. at 7pm

 

The story goes way back, to the war-stricken year of 1993, when Admir and I did not know each other, but we shared mutual friends. We had heard about each other, and this reputation was based on how much we could drink. Then we met and decided to see who could drink more pints of beer. It was the time when, by some chance, Bihać brewery worked at full speed, and this enabled our alcoholic duel, inspired by the ones from the Wild West. This movie duel in Mlin Cafe in Cazin resulted in our long-standing friendship. Thus, I once had a chance to act as Admir’s official manager for the sale of drawings of good-looking Amazons dressed in BiH Army uniforms to the owner of a cafe in the same city. We earned fifty Convertible Marks from the sale and spent it on the delicious drink made of barley and hops. Later on, our friendship turned into a concrete form of artistic collaboration, and thus Jasna, Admir’s future wife, created a graphic design for my first book Pjesme u nastajanju (Acquired Poems) based on Admir’s drawing, and I mostly liked this book precisely because of its design. After that, I wrote a surrealistic poetic text for the exhibition catalogue of one of Admir’s first exhibitions. We increasingly began to engage with our own art in a more serious way, and during our soirees we would discuss literature and art, their unity and differences.

This series of small prints is dominated by many motives from Admir’s first print series Journey. Here we have horses in a bustling crowd, dancing in a kind of vortex, created with precise strokes of a needle, then new fish motives, and, what prevails in these miniature prints: floating worlds or floating countries with structures that resemble the Bosnian religious buildings, like some symbiosis of church and mosque with fairy-tale children’s eyes, then houses like Russian nesting dolls that happily watch us from pieces of land floating like Magritte’s floating castles. I remember one of Admir’s drawings (which was included in the selection of the International Exhibition of Drawings in Rijeka in 2001), after the cycle Journey, titled Homeland in Exile, and I believe this drawing was the starting point for the majority of these small prints. Although I am no expert in fine arts, and I look at the work of art exclusively in a literary way, I believe that the metaphor of Homeland in Exile is the central motif of this exhibition. Which, in my opinion, is another proof that the artist, no matter how hard he tried, cannot escape the reality that surrounds him. And this reality we live in, whether we want to admit it or not, is a sad, tragic living fresco in which it is almost impossible to achieve a life worthy of a human being. However, Admir’s floating worlds are anything but sad, they are tiny windows which the sun pours through. So these prints are not a direct anti-utopian view of the condition in which our spirits frantically fight for a small fragment of human happiness. They are primarily happy visions of a different, imaginary world from the artist’s imagination. Admir’s worlds are cheerful in an infantile way, in the way we, as children, enjoyed and escaped into literary or cinematic magical landscapes.

What gives maturity and strength to these prints is a masterly stroke of a hand that draws its obsessions in a filigree manner. This Admir’s filigree style might reflect the wish of the artist to bring closer and explain the existing world to himself and others, to find the centre and meaning that marked the great modernist quest throughout the twentieth century. The quest for some of the basic human values: kindness or happiness, which have completely disappeared today or are seen as out-dated, ancient human flaws. This is just an impressionistic view of Admir’s floating worlds that, most probably, can also reflect that cursed feeling of exile and lack of belonging to the twentieth century, the whole of which can fit into Lt. Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) quote: I love the smell of napalm in the morning, from Coppola’s unsurpassed movie Apocalypse Now. As it stands, we will be forever trapped in that same twentieth century, just like flies in amber.

Admir’s prints, devoid of any pretentiousness, assure us that the power of art in dark times lies precisely in its fragility and helplessness against the gigantic dynamic of evil, which develops beyond our will, and that we can find salvation in the imagination that makes our private floating worlds possible.

Faruk Šehić

Admir Mujkić was born in 1972 in Sisak, Croatia. He enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, Department of Graphic Arts, in the class of professor Salim Obralić, and graduated in the class of professor Dževad Hoza. He also completed post-graduate studies at the same Academy. He has won numerous awards and exhibited in the country and abroad. He is the president of the Association of Artists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ULUBIH and the Macedonian Association of Artists, Veles. Admir lives and works in Sarajevo.

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

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