Femininology to present recent works by Croatian contemporary artists under the auspices of Ožetski’s own work: “Everything around us, including ourselves, is made of waves vibrate at different frequencies. ”With a new exhibition, five Croatian visual artists reveal their creative frequency, encouraging us to,

The exhibition project “Femininology” is the work of visual artists who fully or segments accept the multiple identity of women, numerous archetypes and stereotypes to which they are exposed, trying to penetrate the woman’s essence and go through art in search of her real role and meaning in society. Artists often embody fundamental archetypal principles through their work. They thematize their own identity by passing through the “general places” of our civilizational stumbling blocks – sexuality, personal freedoms, imposed roles, but also being self-referential, touching our own intimacy, feelings, revealing ourselves as exceptional spiritual and artistic beings. And their art stories transcend their native times and become general and universal, both classical and contemporary,

On Friday, September 24, the eleventh exhibition of the exhibition project Femininology, which began seven years ago (2014), was opened in cooperation with the Museum of Prigorje in Sesvete. In the presence of numerous visitors, the opening was embellished by the artists themselves, and the exhibition, women’s cooperation, support of institutions and the City were discussed by: Morena Želja Želle, Museum Director, Sanda Stanaćev Bajzek, project author and curator of the exhibition and Ivana Crnković, envoy of the Mayor and Head of the City Office for the Culture of the City of Zagreb

Femininology 2021 presents contemporary Croatian artists who, by choosing an expressive medium, go beyond the framework of the classical, combining classical artistic expressions with the conceptual and applied. Through their work, they embody fundamental female, but above all human principles, which are clearly read from their recent works through a complex morphology and interdisciplinary approach to the work. These are Ivana Bakal, Gordana Drinković, Ivana Ožetski, Lada Tomašić and Jana Žiljak Gršić.

Driven by a strong research nerve, bridging the framework of the traditional in the formal and substantive domain of painting, Ivana Ožetskipersonal worldview and the need for artistic creation are often built on opposites, on the area of ​​form and roughness of material, on coloristic contrasts, abstract and figurative, now concentrated in red-black graphic “dichotomy”, in “forms-spheres” as entities of micro worlds. reveals to them, in “forces-formations” which arise from observing the grouping of particles and living organisms in nature, testifying to the artist’s idea that all forms are “written” in us and just waiting for transformation into another medium, waiting to become a new creation from the invisible world. visible new entities. Miraculous morphology that comes from the source of strong female intuition and vibrates at a higher potency. 

On the frequency that was “caught” by the young textile designer Lada Tomašić, reaching into the rich treasury of Indo-European culture imbued with strong spirituality, successfully reinterpreting it in a contemporary and above all original visual medium. Namely, they consider her the first of the young generation of Croatian artists who dared to use textile design exclusively for artistic purposes, making textile paintings with a unique technique that she designed herself, combining the incredible freedom of different techniques. Approaching the textile canvas as a painter, he builds his artistic-textile sensation with pieces of various fabrics, which become particles of the painting, sewing and sewing with thread as a line, his unique “image” of a gentle and strong woman at the same time. The painting was produced by Jana Žiljak Gršić with an original and also unique technique, whose typographic portraits with the first we can call modern icons, because the innovative infrered technology represents today’s icons – fatal famous women, actresses and singers. They are created by a comparative rendering of a photograph, specifically a photo-portrait and a Latin letter as a sign and the basic building block of an “image”. With such construction, it changes not only the meaning, that is, the role of letters, but also the meaning of the image itself, which we now see and read. These “art puzzles” that reveal their final answer to us in a hidden infrared layer of the image (which we reveal with the help of an infrared camera), as if they have their three-dimensional version in “feminine” installations, costumes-figures by Ivana Bakal. Exceptional visual eloquence, female activist component and conceptual thinking of costumes as an object or installation, are concentrated in the work of this costume designer, who creates “living figures” with her visual theater, vivid images that impressively communicate with the viewer , but also to women’s general existential, ethical, and aesthetic dilemmas, revealing her affective and emotional states through a critical attitude toward the weaknesses of her own gender. Because from childhood to death, power, envy, desire for success, infect a woman stronger and more permanently than any man.

And the one who almost fatally reveals her weaknesses and her pains is certainly Gordana Drinković.In the fragile medium of glass, which she embraced as her second skin, she creates sensationalist poetic visual experiences, sincere and painful, like glass “tears rising towards the sky”. These colorless, gray and black crystal glass forms reveal the exceptional craftsmanship of the artist, hiding behind her fragile beauty a strong emotional dimension, mourning for a deceased loved one. Letting the glass stretch to the limit of cracking, it conforms to it by feeling its trembling, its slant, its meandering. He does this with vessels from the “Africa” ​​collection, which in turn seem to come from the cradle, from the primordial form, associating morphology with the female body as a life-giving vessel. To the one who creates and gives birth. Which records and remembers. Just like glass. Creating in moments of greatest vulnerability unrepeatable beauty.

The beauty that women artists brought us with their work, tuned to the divine frequency. 

Author: Sanda Stanacev Bajzek

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