Alba Miočev / Guide, shelf life: when it will be

Solo exhibition

FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION

Introduction to "Guide, Shelf Life: When It Will Be" is the title of the new cycle by Alba Miočev in which the author continues, but this time much more intensively, to explore her own painting expression. Precise portraits of fine execution and natural landscapes, as well as diary visual records still remain recognizable determinants of Alba's authorial signature, but their value relations are now changing, which is unambiguously evident from the iconography of her drawings and paintings. The portraits have become miniatures, the scenes from the photograph figure as a picture within a picture retained in the space of the natural landscape that now absolutely dominates the canvas. Large climates and even the entire Velebit are covered. The realistic treatment of environmental segments now gives way to abstracted expression that deepens the horizons of the painting and broadens the scope of the author's sensibility. The copied photographs, no matter how minuscule their dimensions may seem, mark the starting point in the work, whether they are family photographs, photographs of close people or complete strangers from an album bought in a Berlin second-hand bookshop. These meta-paintings do not seem to correspond to the whole, both formally and content-wise, but they still predetermine the creation of a new work. As such, they contain memories, personal or reconstructed, visceral memories of the atmosphere that filled the space at that moment. Memory thus mediates in the painting of new, freer and abstracted landscapes, it is now the result of associativity and not literal recording, it acquires a symbolic meaning, as well as coloring, which is now dominated by vibrant blue, red and orange tones, but also large textured white surfaces that sometimes feel like a continuation of the canvas that ceases to be just a passive surface on which colors are applied. The author retains the intensity of color and the lightness of expression. The flickering of light typical of its expression still exists, but all those small shifts in texture that achieve such an effect have now become layers of different spots that loudly evoke the organic world. However, this interpretation is relative, it is personal and certainly conditioned by countless factors as our memories that are just as relative and change over time, just like my memories of these works in the studio. The paintings from this cycle have taken their shape and at every moment convey the truth that changes with each present moment. Each painting is an introduction to the guide – after all, this series of works represents a new creative phase, it marks a space of searching, transforming and rejecting burdens, the leap seems almost radical. I ignore the concluding interpretation, it is relative anyway, only one collective symbol on the central canvas of this series is crucial enough. The depiction of Velebit, the massif that swells on this canvas, is covered with intermittent lines and accents of color, and it is actually about conveying the schematized lines of drawn climbing guides that give information about the difficulty of the climbing direction. The mountain is a metaphor for the path of development and challenges, and nature contains some inherent wisdom that leads us to the goal. How long this metaphysical guide for painters through symbolism and memories will be needed is really impossible to predict, but it is certainly necessary now because it is obvious that the goal is already very close.

Jelena Šimundić Bendić

BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR

Alba Miočev was born in 1994 in Zadar. She enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Painting, in 2014. She spent part of her Erasmus+ studies at the University of Ulster in Belfast, and after completing her undergraduate studies as part of her Erasmus internship, she worked at the GlogauAir residency in Berlin. She has exhibited in group exhibitions, some of which are Situation (Forum Gallery), Intima (Kranjčar Gallery), Non-Aligned (Lauba), Recycle or try (VN Gallery), Erste Fragments (Lauba) and at a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Matica hrvatska. She is also engaged in wall painting and participates in mural festivals, some of which are GNG, Re:Think Sisak, KvartArt, Zen Opuzen, Facade Festival.

The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.

You can see the exhibition in the Šira Gallery during the working hours of the Gallery (Mon-Fri: 9-16 h, 18-20 h, Saturday: 11-16 h) until 29.4.2023.