Concept: Branko Franceschi
Curators: Branko Franceschi, Toni Horvatić
Assistant Curator: Adriana Perojević
Production: Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with Lucija and Marko Marin Collection
After publication and promotion of the Legacy monograph in January 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts presents the critical retrospective of Zlatan Dumanić that will provide the audience with the insight into the versatility, complexity and, equally important beauty of Dumanić’s work and dandyism of his personal style. The exhibition is mainly composed, along the works from the museum collection, of the artworks that were found in the artist’s apartment after his death. They were preserved thanks to the Marko and Lucija Marin Collection, as well as the ones that were purchased for the collection in spite of the volatile Croatian art market. The exhibition, similar to the monograph, will present the outlines of Dumanić’s multimedia legacy that consists of numerous sculptures, installations, paintings and painted compositions, drawings, diaries, artist and experimental books, objects that surpass the common, presently very loosely perceived definitions of the artwork, as well as the performance documentation.
This exhibition is the first of the series of projects that will affirm Dumanić’s oeuvre within the corpus of Croatian art and art in general whose multidisciplinary, public, space and content specific multicultural paradigm Dumanić intuitively accepted and practiced in its very beginnings. His charismatic presence and unpredictable temperament have charged Split and Croatian art scene for decades, presenting one of the most powerful performances of radical avant-garde programme in equating art with life. His relationship towards reality was uncompromising, beyond the clichés of healthy life and political correctness. His critique of social deviations was brutal, his erotomania direct, and his visual language sensual and poetic. While there exist artists that are unanimously liked, Dumanić was an artist who primarily loved, lived and reflected the proverbial opposites of his hometown. Therefore, Return of the Captain presents not only the artistic work and career, but also communicates the perspective whose emancipatory setup has never been more important.