ARCHIVE · 2002
| JOSIP COLONNA (Dubrovnik 1911 - Naples 2001) Retrospective - Presentation of the donation to the MMAD Curated by Sanja Žaja Vrbica December 21 to January 26, 2004 (extended to February 9, 2003) |
 |
The painterly oeuvre of Josip Colonna is marked by a highly unusual diversity, in terms of theme, style, form and technique. He expressed himself in various forms of figuration with an Expressionist tone, in colourist and monochrome abstractions, versions of Action Painting. He used watercolour, pastel, collage and, in conjunction with etchings, combined various print techniques, as well as dealing with sculpture.
| ETTORE-RAJČEVIĆ-RAŠICA Curated by Antun Karaman November 28 to December 15, 2002 |
 |
 |
Ettore, Rajčević and Rašica are a trio of Dubrovnik painters who worked together between 1930 and 1940. In this period they were marked by a common propensity to an expressive and colourist manner of painting.
| PAOLA YACOUB AND MICHEL LASSERRE Presentation of work within the context of the project Dubrovnik - Here and Elsewhere / Dubrovnik - ici et ailleurs Curated by Catherine David November 5, 2002 |
 |
 |
Paola Yacoub (born in Beirut, 1966, took her degree at the AA School of Architecture in London) and Michel Lassere (born in 1947 in Auche, France, studied architecture and philosophy in Paris) have been working together since 1996. Together they have had many lectures on the corporeal dimension of architecture. Architecture is the basis of their work in art in which they have an active relationship with the facts of turbulence in the contemporary world, particularly those connected with the Near East.
| KSENIJA TURČIĆ Conversations Video installations September 27 until 29, 2002 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The video installations of Ksenija Turčić are mainly composed of two or more juxtaposed parallel projections of her own or other people's blown-up faces, or more exactly, parts of them, particularly the eyes, and parts of the everyday setting (like the door in the work Slow Motion, for instance). The script of these works is an extremely simple: visual events and the sounds (beating of the heart, some curt sentence spoken in a whisper, the creaking and banging of doors) that accompany them - all minimal. Without extraneous narration or illustrative aids, in spare adumbrations of a condensed expression, the space of the inner life is externalised and conveyed into the public, physical space of the gallery. Alternatively, the external space is transformed into the space of the psyche.
The strictly individual, subjective, almost private point of departure and problems become broadly communicative and familiar. An introverted work shows itself paradoxically to be highly social. The theme of the artist - tension and aspiration for self-communication, its successful and less successful periods and achievements, meet their match in our own relationship with the work.
| FROM THE HOLDINGS OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART DUBROVNIK August 10 to the end of 2002 |
 |
 |
In the latest set-up of carefully chosen works from the rich holdings of the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik there are more than hundred works by 39 artists from the end of nineteenth to the end of twentieth century. Amongst other, there are works by Bukovac, Medović, Vidović, Meštrović, Herman, Kraljević, Becić, Uzelac, Tartaglia, Šimunović, Gliha, Ivančić, Dulčić, Smajić, Kršinić, Bakić, Knifer, Kožarić...
| BORIS CVJETANOVIĆ The City Photographs August 10 until September 8, 2002 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
In his shots of damaged facades and walls, of written-off cars and forgotten objects, the poignantly awkward decorations that additional heighten the grievousness of their settings, the bloody remains of a messy dove on the ground where fresh blades of grass are pushing out, the art informel of excreta and urine on the asphalt... Boris Cvjetanović has renounced horizons and perspective, his gaze has been directed to the ground, sent off into corners, to the pitiable places of shame at the outskirts of the city. In this series, Cvjetanović has actually radicalised the interest shown in Scenes without Significance, his well-known cycle from the early 90s. If there we were shown modest motifs, out of the daily grind, which retained the remains of the perspective, and were often marked by a certain charm, now they are scenes that are to the maximum naturalist. However, unsparing he might be to things and to himself, we would say that this is nevertheless a view of clemency and compassion. Perceiving the margin of the street, the tumbledown and smeary outskirts, dissecting a reality that is already decomposed, and its faded colour, Boris is fighting for the right to the annunciation of misfortune, the correction of disenfranchisement, the legitimacy of the world's periphery.
| STANKO ABADŽIĆ In Absentia Photographs August 10 until September 8, 2002 |
 |
Stanko Abadžić (Vukovar, 1952) created the most important part of his oeuvre in Prague, where he lived from 1995 to 2002. It is photos from his Prague period, 59 of them, in classic black and white technique, that Abadžić is showing at this Dubrovnik exhibition. The photographer
discovers, isolates and registers images that recall the cult films of the Czech school, conveying the atmosphere of the literature of Bogumil Hrabal but also making references to the classics of both Czech and world photography (for example of Josef Sudek or Cartier-Bresson, to whom he pays direct homage in the titles). As if he had done a masterly time-slalom, the artist has side-stepped the contemporary moment of civilisation and technology, his compositions being covered with a kind of pacifying layer of patina where indubitable items witnessing to this particular historical moment (adverts, cars...) join in the complex of nostalgic and yearning pictures without any sense of conflict.
| MARIA PAPADIMITRIOU Presentation of work within the context of the project Dubrovnik - Here and Elsewhere / Dubrovnik - ici et ailleurs Curated by Catherine David. July 27, 2002 |
|
 |
Maria Papadimitriou was born in Athens in 1957. She studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1981 and 1986. She teaches in the Architecture Department in Salonika University, Greece. She has taken part in many groups shows round the world, for example in the 25th Bienal de Sao Paolo and Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt in 2002. She is the creator of the long-term TAMA project, which is being carried out in an Athenian Romany settlement and which will be presented in Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik.
| PERCEPTION Curated by Jean de Breyne June 29 until July 28, 2002 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Jean de Breyne, poet and gallery manager, owner of the L'Ollave Gallery and the magazine L'Ollave Preoccupations, headquartered in Lyons, brought together seven artists: Pam Skelton (Harrogate, UK, 1949); Jean-Louis Raynard (Lyons, 1954), Pere Noguera (La Bisbal d'Emporda, Spain,1941), Eleonore Bak (Homburg, Germany, 1959),Ludovic Lignon (Soissons, France, 1966) and Toni Meštrović (Split, 1973), Evan Burnet-Smith (Redruth, England, 1952). These are artists of various different artistic persuasions, but have in common an active and dynamic attitude towards aspects of contemporary reality. They use contemporary media, photography, video, sounds, ready-mades so as to be able to speak out through their own visions of the problems of the world that surrounds us, highlighting in their works their own being, their presence in time and space, cultivating an attentive attitude towards the place their current action.
"My work is set in the social context of art. Inside this context, calling upon the observer to project himself into each role individually in order to be able to check out their strength, I endeavour to reinterpret the role of the artist, the observer, and their relationship. I hope that making the social role of art fluid, the observer can find opportunities for confirming the fluidity of all social roles and identities." (Santiago Reyes)
The young artist and great traveller Santiago Reyes (1971, Quito, Ecuador) includes the fact of his nomadic life as a structural part of his works. On the other hand, obliterating every possible exoticism and picturesqueness on completely different points of the globe, the author seems at the same time to negate their specialness. In the works that Santiago Reyes presented on this occasion in Dubrovnik, such an approach was very visible. A number of short videos lasting for a minute and half were made in various cities: in Quito, Paris, Milan, Montreal, Berlin, Brussels, Dubrovnik, but the scenario, text, choreography, and direction are identical. Even the settings in which the film takes place are mutually interchangeable, saying nothing of the clichés that the names of the individual world destinations would inevitably imply. Thus the author speaks of the uniformity that reigns in the global village, the interchangeability of the distant separate parts, the identity of dreams, hopes and anxieties, and also expresses his fascination with the possibility of communicating diversities that are subsequently tamed.
| THE NEW DISPLAY FROM THE HOLDINGS OF THE GALLERY April 5 until June 15, 2002 |
 |
 |
The most important names of Croatian modern art were shown, such as Bukovac, Medović, Vidović, Kraljević, Becić, Babić, Job, Uzelac, Dulčić, Masle, Pulitika, Kulmer, Bakić, Knifer, Kožarić....
| VLAHO BUKOVAC Drawings (1887 to 1921) Curatd by Antun Karaman April 5 until June 15, 2002 |
|
|
This exhibition shows 63 drawings by Vlaho Bukovac, exhibited for the first time. Bukovac started almost every undertaking in painting with a drawing-a large number of drawings, sketches, notes or working jottings with which he set up and built the composition of the whole or described the details preceded every picture painted. Whether this was a landscape, a portrait, a nude or a group scene the procedure was always the same: for each detail that he would paint into the picture, he first of all did a rough sketch, and then finely modelled individual sections (always looking for the best solutions, sometimes doing the same detail again and again), according to the course of the process by which the given segment was built into the picture as a whole and before it was enlarged to the real dimensions (Bukovac sometimes dividing the surface into regular squares for the purpose) or alternatively according to the course of the process in which the final composition of the project had that had been conceived was being constructed. For drawing, Bukovac most and most happily used a pencil, but he was also fond of charcoal (Self-portrait, 1877), Indian ink (Storks, before 1877), and if necessary coloured chalk (Female Nude, ca 1889) but above all white, to emphasize the highlights in the volume.
| MARIJAN GUVO Retrospective Curated by Tonko Maroević February 9 to March 9, 2002 |
 |
The insufficiently well known Dubrovnik painter Marijan Guvo (Kotor, 1924 - Dubrovnik 1999) found in the multiplicity of city motifs the first spurs to his visual expression. A coeval and friend of Vaništa, Stančić,Ivančić, Kulmer and Dogan, he belonged to the generation that in the years after World War II opened up the way to fresher and more universal currents of art. Guvo's oeuvre has nothing in common with the dominant tendencies of modern Dubrovnik colourism, with the Expressionist and temperamental expression of the famed Dubrovnik painterly trios (Ettore-Rajčević-Rašica, Dulčić-Masle-Pulitika). He builds his world on completely different premises and enriches the Croatian painting of the epoch on which he worked with a successful crystallisation of signs/symbols, from the magma of ephemeral phenomena, with the most sophisticated chromatic registers.
| LIISA ROBERTS Presentation within the context of the project Dubrovnik - Here and Elsewhere / Dubrovnik - ici et ailleurs Curated by Catherine David January 22, 2002 |
|
 |
The guest appearance of Liisa Roberts in the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik meant a continuation of the project Dubrovnik - Here and Elsewhere / Dubrovnik - ici et ailleurs of the well-known critic and curator Catherine David.
Since 2000 Liisa Roberts has been working on a long-term project in Vyborg (Russia) in which she proposes the use of the library, a work of famed modern Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and a monument of culture protected by UNESCO, as a lens that since its creation in 1935,has seen and thought the city of Vyborg. The library is currently in the process of restoration, and the author's project, which is developing in cooperation with a group of teenagers from Vyborg, proposes a kind of parallel restoration through the development of a scenario for a film about the city today.