Text: Vanja Babić
Exhibition set-up: Daniel Kovač
"...The exhibition has been divided into two compatibile parts, different ih form but poetically extremely coherent and mutually complementary. In both of them Daniel, in a visually impressive manner, gives some of his views on the phenomenon of civilization. His sculpture/objects show the consciousness of diversity of different civilizations, their temporariness, but also the participation of individuals in every one of them. Salt that within large vertically set capsulle made of artifical glass slowly goes into the ground, indicates common points and dividing lines beetwen two geo-curtural areas the artist belongs to: Mediterranean and Middle European. In the second capsule there is a thin layer of gravel and asphalt and above and below it there is a large quantity of earth. Here as . well, Daniel's massage is more than clear. Namely, gravel and asphalt symbolise the road which is the metaphor of civilization that will be ruined and disappear to be covered with new layers of earth.
In the second part of the exhibition Daniel shows his own objects for personal use such as his toothbrush, comb and razor. Pressing them into small concrete blocks, he transformed them into special relics of contemporary civilization at the same time leaving his intellectually-artistic, as well as existentially-personal trace to the archaeologists of some distant future. As moulds fot the blocks of concrete he used plastic containers of different industrial products. This way be recycling junk, a work of contemporary art has been created that, however, with its form and content expresses the conciousness of the future where it will become a relic of distant past."
Vanja Babić
Daniel Kovač was born in Subotica in 1966. He studied architecture, but graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb in 1966. He has been a member of HDLU since 1966, and a manager of the Gallery VN in Zagreb.
