DAVID PAVLOVIĆ / VIRUS
Graduation exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
The series "Virus" arises from the space between the image and the screen, between personal experience and collective visual memory. In the works of David Pavlović, religious symbols, the aesthetics of Internet culture, fragments of video games, glitch, pixel and traces of handicraft meet. Pavlović does not observe digital culture from a distance or approach it exclusively critically. His painting arises from the experience of life within it, from the feeling of continuous exposure to images, information and symbols that are tirelessly repeated, copied and transformed. Because of this fact, the very motif of repetition becomes crucial: religious signs and internet memes function according to a similar logic of survival. They survive because they are constantly transferred, reinterpreted and adapted to new contexts. In this process, the image is no longer a stable object, but a living system of meaning. The exhibition "Virus" is not only about digital aesthetics, but about the contemporary state of view. About a world in which the boundaries between the sacred and the banal, the original and the copy, memory and algorithm are constantly erased. Through painting, Pavlović tries to slow down this process. His works act as frozen fragments of collective consciousness, at the same time intimate and universal, ironic and melancholic, aggressive and vulnerable. In a time in which paintings arise and disappear faster than ever, Virus raises the question of whether painting can still be a space of duration. The answer offered by this exhibition is not a return to the past, but an attempt to retranslate contemporary experience digitally, fragmented and overloaded into a physical, human and painterly living space.
FROM THE CURRICULUM VITAE
David Pavlović graduated from the School of Applied Arts and Design in Osijek, where he received his secondary education as a painter. He is currently a graduate student of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of prof. art. Dr. Ksenija Turčić. During his studies, he develops his authorial artistic expression through the exploration of the relationship between contemporary digital culture, virtual spaces and the traditional medium of painting, with special emphasis on materiality, handmade and the process of creating a work of art.
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art projects. He has exhibited at the Ligatura Gallery, the APURI Gallery in Rijeka and the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum in Zagreb on the occasion of the International Day of Colors. He also participated in the Birthday of Art event at the Academy of Music in Zagreb, as well as in the final exhibitions of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 2022 to 2025. In 2023, he participated in the realization of a mural for KBC Rebro. Through his work, he explores the possibilities of connecting traditional painting with visual elements of the digital environment, creating works that question the boundaries between physical and virtual space.
The exhibition at the Šira Gallery 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 June 5, 2026.