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In her two-decade presence on the visual art scene, ever since her student days, Katarina Ivanišin Kardum carefully honed and polished her painting style, establishing an artistic singularity and managing to find not only aesthetic, spiritual and emotional pleasure in her visual approach, but also enough visual problematics to constantly intrigue her. Series after series, she is shown to be an increasingly mature painter who is constantly trying to interpret her style in a new way. It is precisely this evolution, not only of style, but ideas that accompany that style, which determine the courage of an artist to always search for a new direction, additional words that do not exist in language, novel narrative manners – in a word, for art. In no way does the focus on traditional painting motifs, landscape and still life, prevent the artist from succeeding, already at that level, in forming traits of her own poetics together with making progress towards an individual style. Skilful in her observations, she is an impeccable master of space and forms therein, while that which she perceives and experiences, stored in her vision and consciousness, becomes an inspiration that produces the desired concepts not only of spatial information, but subjective excitement, atmospheric and spiritual conditions of seldom achieved expressiveness.

The backbone of Katarina Ivanišin Kardum’s work is questioning the human being (oneself) in a relationship with nature, whereby nature itself is only a starting point for the construction of an intellectual spiritual garden (an immense external garden in the mountains series, i.e. an intimate garden in the interior, literally in a wardrobe in the birds series) in which we read personal, but also general, universal conditions and knowledge of primary value, a universal tale of all our existences.

... (from the essay by Marija Stipišić Vuković)

Katarina Ivanišin Kardum is an artist from Dubrovnik. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art Painting at the City and Guilds of London Art School in 1998, and in 2000 she completed a two-year Master of Arts postgraduate Fine Art Painting Course at the Royal College of Art in London. From 2000 to 2008 she worked as a freelance artist and a graduate level lecturer at the City & Guilds of London Art School. After moving to Croatia, along with her artistic work she worked as a museum educator in the Dubrovnik Natural History Museum until 2014, and since at the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla in Zagreb.

She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. In 2019, following the solo show Birds and Mountains in the Museum of Fine Arts Split, she will have a solo show at the Art Workshop Lazareti (ARL), Dubrovnik. Recent group shows include: Landscape Spaces, Prsten Gallery, HDLU, Zagreb (2019); Desertion, Vizura Aperta, Janjina (2019); Flat Earth, 26th Slavonian Biennial, Museum of Fine Arts, Osijek (2018): Horrors of the Homeland, Sponza Palace, Dubrovnik (organized by ARL and Dubrovnik Summer Festival) (2018); (Non) personal, Salon Galić Gallery, Split (2016); Dubrovnik, Museum of Modern Art, Dubrovnik (2015); Opening, ARL, Dubrovnik (2014).

In 2015, she won the 1st prize, T_HT Award at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb for her piece Still Landscape Series III.

Public collections include: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Museum of Modern Art, Dubrovnik; the City of Dubrovnik; British Government Art Collection, DFEE, London; City of London Institute; St. George's Hospital, London.

Her artworks were used in the following films: Second Act, directed by Peter Segal (2018); Holy Lands, directed by Amanda Sthers (2017), and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, directed by Simon West (2001).

She lives and works in Dubrovnik, Zagreb and Drače.

katarinaivanisin@yahoo.co.uk

On view till 30, September, 2019.