A brief personal history of the radical tendencies of modern and contemporary art in Croatia.
Personal Cuts focus is conceptual tendencies, in the broadest sense of the term, starting with the neo-avant-garde from the periods of 1950s and 1960s, the “New Art Practice” of the 1970s and expands to include some art of today that has a strong conceptual background. “Conceptual Art” in Zagreb is understood differently to the “western canon” and covers an enormous range and means of expression, a wide array of works and practices. The artists moved towards new materials, media, methods and behavior they shifted their interests from objects to the “conduct” of making art in search of a redefinition of the role of the artist towards social, political, and economical realities and within the places they were (and are) living.
After the Croatian cultural season in France in 2012 and the entry of this state in the European Union in 2013, Carré d'Art-Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nimes hosting in 2014 an exhibition with a historical perspective on contemporary artistic production from Zagreb both innovative and committed. This publication is a direct extension of the show, opening with the chronology of radical production and its context, in which Branka Stipančić backs on the 1950s to 1970s, notably with the Gorgona Group, Exat 51 and to contemporary productions.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Carré d'art, Nîmes, from October 17, 2014 to January 11, 2015.
Branka Stipančić, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 1983 to 1993, director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 1993 to 1996, she is now an art historian, curator and editor based in Zagreb. She holds degrees in art history and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb.
