35th Youth Salon / VENIENTES
Group exhibition
VENIENTES
In the Šira Gallery, in the period from 10 to 20 November 2020, we had the honor to host the exhibition "Venientes", which this year is held as part of the program of the 35. Youth Salon. Also, this year the "Venientes" project marks its tenth anniversary, since it was founded in 2012 by the late professor Slavomir Drinković. In this sense, this year's exhibition is also an homage to its founder.
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
Venientes – 'those who are coming' – is the name of the exhibition of graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Zagreb, which we are presenting in the Šira Gallery on the tenth anniversary, and as part of this year's 35. Youth Salon. It is an exhibition designed by the late professor and dean, red. prof. art. Slavomir Drinković and at which graduate students of all six departments of the academy regularly exhibited. In the ten-year period, the exhibition has been hosted in several exhibition spaces (Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall, Marisall Gallery, Šira Gallery, HDLU as part of the Youth Salon). Every year, over thirty authors participated in the exhibition, which to date has a total of over three hundred exhibitors. But who are the venientes really? Where do 'they' come from and where are they going?
This year's graduates, as well as others before them, are individuals who have decided to start their creative path at an institution whose goal is to provide knowledge, skills and experience essential for the formation of a complete author's self-awareness. The collective pronoun "they" obscures their irreducible personalities, and therefore it is more appropriate to speak of "her" or "him". But what is his or her creative personality? It is, first of all, a deposit of an original gift that needs to be fertilized and directed by the responsibility of one's own talent. According to Mladen Pejaković, "talent is the ability to be born in a certain language and to transform it into one's own being, into one's personal speech." In relation to the visual language that offers a formative framework, talent is an individual speech by which an individual testifies to the level of acquired artistic literacy. Just as there are different languages in social reality, so visual language has its own dialects and idioms, its mother tongue and its multilingual point of view. They precede the individual, who affirms his personality imaginatively by using historical and expressive forms, sometimes succeeding in upgrading them with new words, that is, inventively transforming the existing syntax into a new order of forms. Therefore, there are many "isms", stylistic configurations and individual models that venientes use as a platform for personal research. The happy union of the creatively transformed and the originally realized is expressed as an organic creation. It testifies to knowledge, to the ability to invent, to imagination and creative intelligence; in some cases, it testifies to the author's originality, which manifests itself as a high reach, foreshadowing a fruitful and successful work. Among them are those who have already stepped onto the art scene, gaining the undivided affection of the profession.
We will not name the exhibitors, nor will we present the individual works, their mutual connections and differences, morphological and semantic characteristics. We will be content to point out their essential, common feature. Despite their individual commitment, or precisely because of it, it is possible to recognize the mark that is their collective, common feature. It is a matter of the predominance of inclination or desire for a refined profiling of their own expression, the technical and formal refinement of the chosen idioms, the limitation of interest in isolated templates that are at the same time interpreted with an ear for the diversity of formal invariants and expressive nuances. In the 'upcoming' we do not encounter a wavering search, but a belief in the credibility of what has been found. Their diverse works can be subsumed under the denominator of gender heterogeneity. It is a clear and unambiguous commitment to one's own electoral decision, a decision that does not point to a choice within the polarity of 'minorities' and 'majority', but to a plurality of equal, personal electoral consents.
Jagor Bučan
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City.
The exhibition can be viewed during the Gallery's working hours (Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., 6 p.m. – 8 p.m., Saturdays: 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) until November 20, 2020.
