Curator: Božo Majstorović
Exhibition set-up: Gorki Žuvela
„Žuvela mental and visual handwriting is recognizable in his recent works brought together around two meaningfully entitled stories – I Water the Flowers Every Day. and Parts of the Day – presented in the Gallery of Fine Arts. Taking art as the communication space (communicating with others, himself, or with his subtenants – as the author himself likes to say) Žuvela opens a number of suvjects and it asks a lot of questions. The questions about the function of the gallery, the role of the spectator and art, a position of an artist, the shape of an artistic act has been brought up. Žuvela makes use of verbal language, industrial products, utilitarian articles designed by him in an analitical manner not avoiding metaphoric expression. He asks for an intimate, a meditative amd quiet engagement…
Direct our eyes from the labelled boots and wooden stands with the flower pots covered in writing, we see the magnified metal painting hangers on the gallery walls. What are they for? Tautological affirmation of themselves, of the space or is there something else? Do they speak of the painting insufficiency? Are they memento of the past or the beginning of something new (looking at them in the context of the gallery we feel more intensely the blankness of the walls)? How are they related to the lower situation? Are they its ultimate consequence or a symobl of unlimited options? Anyhow, visual csimplicity of these re-created functional articles is inversely proportionate to the quantity of questions it puts. Žuvela himself says: Questions count, answers are no problem…
The other part of this exhibition project gives a partial answer. This time Žuvela covers the gallery walls with his cycle of paintings entitled Parts of the Day. The very title reveals the essential subject-matter of these works – time. An omnipresent phenomenon which affects us all, objects and ambiences. We make efforts to arrange time like nature, tame it, control it, live in harmony with it, feel it, understand it. We experience it in fragments of like a series of separate time units each having its rhytm, colour, scent, handwriting, rules. Fot this reason it's better to speak in plural i.e. of the times…“
Božo Majstorović, from the exhibition catalogue
Gorki Žuvela (Našice, 1946) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1971, in the art class of Miljenko Stančić. He belongs to the first generation of artists belonging to Nova umjetnička praksa (The New Artistic Practice; 1966-1978). He creates paintings, objects, spatial installations, graphics and poster designs.
