28/08/2021
Sky above Vodnjan
Ivan Kožarić, Christoph Bruckner, Johanna Charlotte Trede, Damir Očko, Dino Zrnec
28/08/2021 - 25/09/2021
The exhibition Sky above Vodnjan, Apoteka’s specific tribute to Ivan Kožarić’s 100th birthday, is meant as a meeting point of artistic positions and a transgenerational dialogue between artists and the work of Ivan Kožarić. This international polyphony coincides on many levels and is inspired by Kožarić’s artistic practice. It’s named after one of Kožarić’s pieces and it sets Kožarić’s mostly less familiar and rarely exhibited installation, the ceramic ensemble Pipes in the display space.
Emerging artist Dino Zrnec, this time acting as a curator, points out: What is common to most of the invited artists taking part in the exhibition is the fact that their art speaks the language of the materials themselves. It is through language of the used materials that the artists, creating their works, at the same time focus on different moments and poetics – personal, emotional, everyday, banal and funny. Besides, some of the exhibited works have been made as a form of collaboration, with other artists, colleagues or co-workers, who become support and tools for the implementation of the idea, finding spaces for the vitalisation of their own gesture.
This is a relatively small constellation of works made in different media and materials, from sculpture to installation, from video work to appropriated objects. A grid of loose associations and relations between the haptic and the visual, without chronology and hierarchy, conveys the visual experience by delineating the echoes of Kožarić’s artistic matrix, taking part in a re-examination of forms, matter and material, texture, void, brightness, movement, gesture… Material combinations, formal procedures, conceptual explorations give an insight into the artist’s creative processes.
All of us – artists, curators, audience – have learned from Kožarić. Inspired by his work, his elusive gesture, his freshness of self-renewing visual language, we have adopted an openness to experimentation, challenges, unconventional gestures and casual, unusual combinations.
Thanks: Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Atelijer Kožarić (Grad Zagreb), Snježana Pintarić and Radmila Iva Janković
Apoteka is supported by:
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Vodnjan, Region of Istria,
Tourist Board Vodnjan, Medea wine-Salvela oil.