APURI Rijeka / Heterogeneity of Poetics

Group exhibition

FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION

For a little more than seventeen years, the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka has been intensely influencing the cultural scene of its city, and through the artistic and pedagogical staff it educates, it is increasingly becoming an unavoidable factor in its formation. A small part of the described work, presented from the painting oeuvre of three graduates of the Painting course: Dorie Valković, Lea Labrović and Doris Lamazza, is presented to the Zagreb audience at the "Šira" Gallery with a return exhibition, after the presentation of Zagreb students at the Academy in Rijeka, as a now completed product of cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Three young painters, with completely different approaches to the medium of painting, through their own work reflect the mentoring processes of professors who encourage them to search for individual idioms through experiment and respect for heterogeneity within the possibilities of artistic and visual expression, as well as mutual interpolation of other media into the medium of painting, which creates interesting hybrids, especially visible in the works of Doria Valković, who combines image, object and sculpture in her installations, which is especially glaring in her ambience of a virtual butcher shop. Lea Labrović combines classical painterly expression with the medium of illustration, and even comics, creating witty and strange, but artistically very thoughtful and sovereignly executed visuals, which combine elements of pop-culture, graffiti[1]art, and scenes typical of iconography, the so-called "conspiracy theory" with an emphasis on the segment that deals with unidentified flying objects or speculates with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Doris Lamazza confronts us with larger-format paintings that belong to the lyrical-impressionist abstraction and allow the viewer complete freedom to travel through associative sequences, encouraging the viewer to create internal contents as possible interpretations of what is seen within the painting field, whereby this author consciously renounces the placement of any socially engaged message, and in this sense insists on the purity and intactness of the medium, thus making a kind of counterbalance to her colleagues Valković and Labrović, who have directed their artistic searches quite directly in the direction of conceptual painting. In the end, we can only hope that the cooperation between the Zagreb and Rijeka Academies will become a constant of a more intensive schedule, since the conclusion of this joint project in the "Šira" gallery clearly showed that such an exchange of experiences and information is extremely useful and stimulating for both creative and artistic environments.

Assoc. Prof. Prof. Damir Stojnić, APURi

You can see the exhibition in the Šira Gallery during the working hours of the Gallery (Mon-Fri: 9-16 h, 18-20 h, Saturdays: 11-16h) until 7.10.2023.

The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture, Intercity and International Cooperation and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb.