IVANA BAJCER / Welcome
Solo exhibition
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
"Welcome" introduces us to the indefinite space of overlapping artistic work and everyday life. This always complex process of intertwining reality and art is an inexhaustible topic for many artists and art theorists. Artist Ivana Bajcer advocates the inseparability of everyday and artistic work, pointing out, performatively, through drawing and text, their cause-and-effect connection, based on the personal, intimate experience of people in their own family and social environment. Both art and the theoretical basis on which it is created represent the inseparability of their flows based on the materiality of objects, bodies and artistic work, as a fragment of everyday life in which the theoretical framework is the sphere of interpersonal interactions and the social context that is sought to be influenced. "Welcome", and especially "Gratitude", is deeply immersed in Nicolas Bourriaud's "Relational Aesthetics", who sees artistic creation in the works of artists as a fertile terrain for social experiments, a space partially preserved from the uniformity of behavior.
The materiality and connection with the real in Ivana Bajcer's work can be read on several levels. The first is the organization of a family lunch in which the artist fully devotes herself to every detail, from the preparation of five courses of dishes that suit her guests to the careful decoration of the table. The pronunciation content of the thanks is in contrast to the perfectly balanced atmosphere of Sunday lunch, which, despite good intentions, is a well-known place of family conflict and intolerance.
The performative act of saying the Acknowledgments is the primary part of the work that remains entirely in the sphere of everyday life. The author then moves it to the field of visual work in which, through text and image, in lines and small lines, she harmonizes the spoken content of the acknowledgments, inscribing the characters of her family and partners in the forms of the Portrait. The line of the text follows the contours of the body and repeats, closed, relaxed, hunched posture of her loved ones, retaining in all five portraits the same linear treatment of the body and the detailed treatment of the face with small lines, which acts like an anatomical drawing of the human body under the skin. With this, the author points to the very process of stripping and encroaching under the surface, which is the same in the formal and substantive approach to the topic, and in the same way she thanks herself. The Gratitude is expressed in words and a self-portrait with a text that follows the form of a protected fetal position in which a tamed healthy dose of self-criticism emerged from long-term dissatisfaction is inscribed.
In the first exhibition, the work etching Lunch, the dimensions of a large family table, is exhibited by the author right on the table, staging the actual arrangement as in the real situation of the Sunday lunch in which she said the Thanks. In "Welcome", by placing "Lunch" on the wall, she abolishes the representational-mimetic layer and its strong attachment to everyday life, passing the work into a gallery-artistic context without necessarily being attached to a real event. Objects, plates, glasses, cutlery, carafe and bowl of bread simulate objects placed as at lunch, in an almost iconographic way attached to the people to whom the author addresses in "Thanks". Therefore, the paintings represent images, so that all forms of representation, including the actual lunch, the text and the graphics have the same reference code in which the image is understood as referential or simulacre. We wonder what is so healing in repetition and what is so disturbing and exciting in the enchanting conflict with trauma, in the dedicated lunch, in the precise drawing in which the dissatisfaction in resolving the trauma through the work of art is woven and then redeemed?
Autobiographical motifs, memories of childhood and family relationships in "Thanks", and the reckoning with exploitation and misunderstanding of the integrity of a person in "Double Expectations" are an inspiration for their originality and radical subjectivity, in which the author transfers the trauma of relationships at work to the world of art. In order to resolve traumas, Ivana Bajcer reconstructs objects that are associated with exploitation and humiliation at work. Through the artistic act, trauma is resolved that she could not solve in everyday life. For example, a harmless drawing of gloves in which the word Disrespect is woven is actually the act of "throwing a glove in the face" of an ordered person who sent the young artist to the glove shop and to perform various private jobs.
"Double Expectations" is realized in a series of twenty drawings of such objects in which the space of the private, the space of the business and the space of the public merges the author into one – the space of resolving trauma.
Davorka Perić
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Ivana Bajcer was born in Zabok on September 12, 1993. She graduated from the High School of Art, Design, Graphics and Clothing Zabok, graphic department, 2012. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Graphics, in the class of izv.prof.art. Tanja Dabo, 2018 and was awarded the Magna Cum Laude award. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), HULU (Croatian Association of Fine Artists) in Split. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the country and abroad. She participated in the international workshop MAPWorkshop in Budapest (2016), at the 17th International Art Colony in Monoštr / Szentgotthárd in Hungary (2018), at the 22nd International Art Colony LindArt in Lendava (Slovenia 2017), where she won the first prize. She was awarded a commendation for her successful work during the academic years 2013/2014, 2014/2015, 2016/2017. She was awarded the Rector's Award for great teamwork, scientific and artistic work - the opera 'Agrippina' by G. F. Händel, which was a joint project of students of the University of Zagreb and the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (2016), and the Award for the best artistic achievement exhibited at Kulturoš in the city of Čakovec (2018). She is the winner of a scholarship from Erste Bank as part of Erste fragment 13, Zagreb (2017). She is the leader of numerous educational programs and interactive workshops; "Printmaking of High Print" at the international professional and scientific conference "Happy Children", Croatian School Museum, Zagreb. She is currently a title assistant in the field of arts, field of fine arts, branch of graphics, at the Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka.
The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
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 February 28, 2021.
