MARTINA GRLIĆ
Memory and conflict
Karas Gallery
April 4 – April 15, 2018

Opening of the exhibition: Wednesday, April 4 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery

 

Exhibition Memory and conflict, by Martina Grlić, the winner of the HBP Award for Young Artists at the 4th Biennial of Painting last year, will be opened on Wednesday, April 4 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58).

A series of paintings by Martina Grlić titled Memorija i konflikt [Memory and Conflict] comprises two groups of works that are connected both by their theme and by the manner in which they explore the medium. The first group includes paintings created on the basis of archival footage from the last Day of Youth in 1987 (1) (the polyptych Lice iz gomile [A Face from the Crowd] and Vatromet [Fireworks], 2018). The second group consists of works based on archival footage showing the President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Vođa [Leader], 2018), his wife Jovanka Broz (Prva dama [First Lady], 2018) and ideological memorabilia; wreaths and medals that mark the space and time of socialist utopia (Vijenac [Wreath], 2018 and Ordenje [Medals], 2018). (…)

(…)  For seven more years after having been relocated to the starry crevice, the complex strategical situation of Josip Broz Tito (the power) exercised its power using symbols, commemorative festivities and inscriptions of memories and remembrance into time and space. In her series Memorija i konflikt [Memory and Conflict], the artist does not deify that time and space, but in fact shows the complete iconography of one of the potential cultures of memory. Martina Grlić acts as an artist-ethnographer,(2) recording and transforming fragments of past times that are more and more disappearing in the virtual society. In our interview she emphasised that she liked the finite nature of photography (factography) and the possibility to radically alter it through a painting. The fact that she imitates photography, as does Gerhard Richter, using a medium (painting) that is older than photography (3) is just another piece of the mosaic in her examination of the past. Within it, one can simultaneously gaze upon the starry sky and stand in a queue for a holiday- novella at Makhinjauri.

 

(From catalogue preface, written by Josip Zanki, PhD)

(1) The Day of Youth was a commemorative festivity from the era of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which commemorated the birthday of the lifetime president Josip Broz Tito (1892 – 1980). It also continued after his death.
(2) Cf. Foster, Hal “The Artist as Ethnographer”. In: Foster, Hal The Return of the Real. MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1996
(3) Cf. Belting, Hans An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton University Press, Princeton, Oxford, 2011, p. 31

 

Preface

About the artist

 

 

Supported by:

 

 

The exhibition will remain open until April 15, 2018