Category: Events

Despite the Environment
Exhibition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the HDLU and 80 years since the construction of the Home of HDLU
October 26, 2018 – December 2, 2018

Exhibition opening: Friday, October 26, 2018. at 8pm at the Home of HDLU

In 2018, HDLU, today’s largest and oldest art association, gathering over 1,900 art and multimedia artists from all over Croatia, will mark 150 years of existence, as well as the 80th anniversary of the construction of the Home of HDLU, as imagined by Ivan Meštrović, once also the President of the Association.

In marking these important jubilee anniversaries, HDLU issues a monograph 150 years of HDLU, organized lectures and round tables, and organizes a group exhibition. Curatorial concept Despite the Environment (written by esteemed art historian and curator Branko Franceschi) was chosen for the exhibition.

This 150th jubilee of HDLU activity is extremely important for the entire Croatian culture and art, because through history of HDLU, one can see the whole history of Croatian modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition consists of around 60 art works (loaned from various institutions throughout Croatia and private collections) done by members of HDLU, created throughout the history of the Association and in all types of media. The aim of the exhibition is to mark and promote the long-standing role of HDLU in the artistic, cultural and social life of Croatia; to present iconic works of art that shape recent Croatian art history; and to make a critical resume of artistic creativity in Croatia in the past 150 years.

Patrons of the program of marking the jubilee of HDLU activity are the President of the Republic of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar Kitarović and the Mayor of the City of Zagreb, Milan Bandić.

“(…)The presented works of art sublimate the time and context of their origin, so they anchored themselves in the collective or at least the subjective curator’s memory as the ideal image of the period of their emergence. These works have proved as an intriguing and inspiring reflection or a comment about the reference social reality, i.e., through their form or content they represented a deviation in relation to the promoted aesthetic and social values, and through superior examples constituted a foretoken of times yet to come. Their existence testifies about the pioneering role of artists in creating an image of their own time and articulating guidelines for the future. Starting with putting up “The History of Croats“ by Ivan Meštrović (1932) at the pavilion centre, i.e. the present Bačva Gallery, in remembrance of the first exhibition of the members of the Association at the Home of the Croatian Association of Artists, along with an inherent symbolism of exhibiting the sculpture, the other selected works will follow the circular architecture of the space and will ultimately fill it out in a kind of a visual paraphrase of a musical score.”

Branko Franceschi, curator of the exhibition

You can read more about the concept here.

Organizer:

Co-organizer:

Patrons of the exhibition:

Sponsors:

Media Sponsors:

 

WORKING HOURS:

Wednesday to Friday: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 AM – 18.00 PM
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays (November 1st).

The exhibition will remain open until December 2, 2018

DUJE MEDIĆ
OUR MOTHER THE MOUNTAIN
Karas Gallery
October 16 – October 28, 2018

Opening of the exhibition: Tuesday, October 16 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery

Exhibition Our Mother the Mountain, by Duje Medić will be opened on Tuesday, October 16 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58).

“From one drawing to another, from one series to the other, Duje Medić is an increasingly intriguing and delightful artist. Many contemporary drawers succeed in fixating our gaze on their works, but few are those from whose graphite dust one can read poetry and prose, and all the drama of an era, of one human being. What are stories without sound, without color or smell? They are mute, in all shades of gray, with all aroma gone. Yet they are not…

Medić is the drawer and narrator of melancholy, nostalgia, homeland… He is a great fan of material and intangible folk treasures, a young erudite who is constantly learning and than transmitting, sharing, recounting, preserving and reinterpreting. By using his pen, he is inscribing depth into the thin layers of paper. When they become dense, darker than the night, ruled by Šorko, local devil from Brela, they are transformed into heavy, monolithic and three-dimensional sculptures that threaten in silence.

(…)

Traces of Duje´s pencil becomes more solid with age. Spidery and soft creations are present but do not prevail. Duje is one of the few pencil masters who use this fragile tool to create three-dimensional, sculptural characters. Now, when they tell their stories so clearly and unambiguously, Medić can be classified as a new generation of storytellers. Is it true, is it historically grounded, is it accurate…? Who would care about that when stories from the mountain reach our mind and soul? Stories that occupy the whole being, allowing us to forget all worries and pain. Duje´s Brela stories are a new return to the old world we are consciously or unconsciously tied to.”

From preface, written by Anita Ruso

Preface

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Duje Medić was born in 1986 in Makarska. In 2010 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Professor Nevenka Arbanas at the Department of Graphic Arts. He is a member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association (HZSU).

He exhibited in 15 solo and many group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. He is one of the authors of Ex Libris, a group collection of graphic prints published by the National and University Library in Zagreb, as well as an independent collection of graphic prints To Cain’s Tribe. In 2016 he was awarded an artist residency at Cité International des Arts in Paris.

www.dujemedic.com

 

Supported by:

The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).

Working hours:

Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.

The exhibition will remain open until October 28, 2018

IVAN MARKOVIĆ
ANTISTRESS MIX
Karas Gallery
October 2 – October 14, 2018

Opening of the exhibition: Tuesday, October 2 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery

Exhibition Antistress Mix, by Ivan Marković will be opened on Tuesday, October 2 at 7pm at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58).

“Antistress Mix, Ivan Marković’s sixth exhibition functions on two levels. Primarly, it is his personal hommage to 1950s american painting, which he cites as foremost influence on his work.

At the same time, the artist would call this exhibition as return to himself. Monocormatic surfaces, big dimensions and simultaneous absence of big ideas and even bigger pretensions are his both old and new aspirations which – depending of willingness to listen to oneself more then the demands of others – he eagerly and oftenly revisits. But this time at his bravest and one might say – most radical. This time the artist creats with lesser feeling of obligation than before, unburdened even with his own childhood (“No Name“, Golden Angel, Varazdin) – allowing himself to name the exhibition after essential oil that he “accidentaly” found in his atelier. He acquired this name, with no reservations towards banality and at the same time with no ironic distance, as appropriate for his work.

Playing with collage, which preceeded the creation of paintings, writes playfullness, simplicity and childlike freedom into this exhibition, which is something very much new for the artist and coming as a result of already mentioned coming to terms with personal childhood. That novelty could be puer aeternus of the author.”

About the artist

 

Supported by:

The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).

Working hours:

Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.

The exhibition will remain open until October 14, 2018

KATARZA
Toni Mijač
PM Gallery
September 28 – October 14, 2018

 

 

 

KATARZA solo exhibition of  Toni Mijač opens on Friday, September 28, 2018 at 7pm at the PM Gallery of the Home of the Croatian Association of Artists.

 

Maja Pavlinić – Preface
About author

 

Suported by:

 

GALLERIES OPENING HOURS
Wednesday to Friday: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 AM – 18.00 PM
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays

Dom HDLU
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb

TOMISLAV HRŠAK AND VLADIMIR NOVAK
OTHER CENTRE OF CIRCUMSTANCES
Bačva Gallery, Home of HDLU
September 28 – October 14, 2018

 

Opening of the exhibition: Friday, September 28 at 7pm at the Home of HDLU

Exhibition Other Centre of Circumstances, by Tomislav Hršak and Vladimir Novak will be opened on Friday, September 28 at 7pm at the Home of HDLU (Trg žrtava fašizma 16, Zagreb).

“(…) In their site-specific exhibition titled Other Centre of Circumstances, the artists Tomislav Hršak and Vladimir Novak engage in a somnambulist dialogue with the space of Meštrović’s Pavilion. The gallery space is circular in form, and the exhibition’s title ambiguously evokes this circular form of the gallery, as well as the exhibited works of these two artists.

(…)

Besides engaging in a dialogue with space, the works of the two artists also engage in a mutual dialogue. And whereas Hršak is preoccupied with the stages of the human life cycle, in which every ending is inevitably also a new beginning, Novak’s work is, among other things, also a kind of homage to a recently deceased artist Vladimir Dodig Trokut and his black art, and it represents the last station of this circular journey.  (…)”

Mirna Rul

Preface

About the artists

Organizer:

 

 

 

Supported by:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORKING HOURS:
Wednesday to Friday: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 AM – 18.00 PM
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays (August 15).

 

The exhibition will remain open until October 14, 2018

 

IRENA FRANTAL
DE-/+CONSTRUCTION
Karas Gallery
September 18 – September 30, 2018

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018, from 11:00 to 19:00 at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58) you can attend the process of putting up the exhibition by Irena Frantal, called De -/+ construction.

De -/+ construction is an exhibition by Irena Frantal who deals with the boundaries/or lack of them in media (in her case, the media of the book). The artist will build an exhibition at the Karas Gallery on September 18 from 11 am to 7 pm and from the moment she enters the empty gallery, the exhibition exists. Formal opening – sharp boundaries of the media: exhibition – do not exist.

The last day of the exhibition, September 30, the artist will intervene in her work by moving parts and extinguishing/cleaning up the physical part of the work. You are invited to participate in the process from 10 am to 1 pm.

“Dieter Roth did his own Copley Book in collaboration with Richard Hamilton, giving him instructions in the letters he sent from Iceland to London. When the print shop lost one of his drawings, Roth included in the book a letter of apology from the print shop and a description of the drawing. Copley Books are unbound papers of various dimensions in one box. They tell about the process of making books – these books. As a spiral, at the same time constantly spreading, but also confined to itself.

De-/+construction is a work, developed in situ. It’s a book that intertwines its space with the gallery space. Layers of elements (pages; paper residues, created by cutting page edges; folds, created by page browsing; hidden parts; photographs; drawing; text; letters, left out of text cutting; text sketches; bindings; binding materials and covers; tools; text silhouettes; erased text; letter templates…) create an installation that is fluent, soft and changeable. By constantly reading it and by page browsing, it is changing. The observer/ reader’s touch is needed to keep the book alive, and so the viewer – observer/reader is invited to read/browse through pages and parts of this book/exhibition. Some of the questions I ask myself in this work are: Where is the limit/end of the work/book? At what moment does the text begin? Is one part/fragment at the same time a whole?

And finally, is (any) book also an exhibition?”

Irena Frantal

Irena Frantal is a visual artist from Zagreb. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and specialized in the art of the book (MA Book Art) at the University of the Arts in London. In her art practice she explores the media of the book. She collaborates with artists of various profiles on projects that use the book medium. She is the author of a series of Book Art Session workshops.

Contact: irenafrantal@yahoo.co.uk

Supported by:

The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).

Working hours:

Wednesday and Friday: 9am to 3pm | Thursday: 3pm to 7pm | Saturday and Sunday: 9am to 12am
Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays: closed.

The exhibition will remain open until September 30, 2018

Helena Klakočar
MOHA IN TRITON
September 12 – 23, 2018
PM Gallery

MOHA IN TRITON solo exhibition of Helena Klakočar opens on Wednesday, September 12, 2018 at 8pm at the PM Gallery of the Home of the Croatian Association of Artists.

Helena Klakočar’s graphic novels are primarily based on honesty, warmth, intellectual wisdom and social engagement for a better and fairer world. At the same time, she is unobtrusive: she does not boast with images or words. Her works are intellectual and lyrical and engagement is woven into a poetic and humane reflection of the world, on the brink between a contemporary fairy tale and harsh existential reality.

Her latest project, MEDITERRANEAN WALL, is characterized by a simple and unpretentious empathy, poetry and humanity that cut right to the heart of the matter.

If there is anyone who should speak on behalf of people forced by war from their centuries-old homes it is Helena Klakočar and her contemporary style, expressed in a warm and humane manner through the new and growing avant-garde medium of diary-like graphic novel.

Her well-balanced style and texts that go beyond doctrines and politicking are positioned in a true area of artistic creativity, expressed in a mass, widely popular, read and watched picture book medium.

Text author: MSc Branka Hlevnjak, Art Historian

The project “BŠ – 72 Andrija Mohorovičić“, within which the graphic novel MEDITERRANEAN WALL was created, was funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

BRANKA HLEVNJAK – preface

Helena Klakočar – artist statement

About author

Suported by:

   

GALLERIES OPENING HOURS
Wednesday to Friday: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM
Saturday and Sunday: 10.00 AM – 18.00 PM
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and holidays

Dom HDLU
Trg žrtava fašizma 16
10000 Zagreb

HDLU