red. prof. dr. art. Robert Šimrak

He was born in 1967 in Zagreb. He is a contemporary Croatian painter and graphic artist whose oeuvre is directly close to the figuration and aesthetics of pop art. Both the visual impression and the treatment of motifs are close to the aesthetics of emphasized precise drawing, which was promoted by comics and the advertising industry. He graduated in 1992 from the Department of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Professor Ante Kuduz. From 2001 to 2003 he was the president of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists. In 1995 he started working at the Academy of Fine Arts (drawing, nude drawing and painting). Today he is a professor at the Department of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was the Vice-Dean for Students and Teaching and the Vice-Dean for International and Inter-University Cooperation at the Academy of Fine Arts. From 1989 until today, he has had more than fifty solo exhibitions and more than three hundred group exhibitions. He has received multiple awards, and has won several awards for his contribution to painting, graphics and social work. His works are part of important private and national collections.

Already with his earliest works from the late eighties, he very clearly defines the area of his artistic interest and activity, placing it in the interspace of mass media and art. His procedure was based on the selection of visual symbols of mass culture and communication – from comics and advertising photography to religious symbols, brands or logos of a company, which undergo a process of artistic transposition so that their usual context and meaning are completely changed. By transferring the object very precisely to a new medium, thus using Duchamp's method of recontextualization in a certain way, Šimrak only seemingly renounces any personality and authorial recognition in the classical sense in the process. From the virtual world, here understood in a broader sense as the space of all contemporary media, he transports it to the world of art. On the theoretical and artistic level, the origins of Šimrak's art can be found in the pop art of the 1960s and 1970s. Critics recognized a certain socio-cultural engagement in his work from that period, in the sense of questioning the consequences of general mediocratization and cybernetization, and critical reflection on their meaning and influence in contemporary society. In this period, Šimrak's artistic process was primarily based on the reinterpretation and combinatorization of these objects-symbols and their painting and drawing transposition into the metareality of the work of art.

Subjects G2, G3, GD develop a personal graphic expression in which the artistic background and superior knowledge of work in all graphic techniques and programs carry equal importance in thinking about a work of art, where the work must not only be passed through technology, but must be in harmony with technology. Only in this way can a work of art shaped by digital technology have its own weight and purposefulness.

CYCLES: 2023. – 2025. "Purgatory" 2020. – 2023. "Tales of three continents" 2017. – 2018. “42. The Idea of Chaos" 2014. – 2015. "Do you (I) feel lucky?" 2011. – 2012. "Objectification" 2008. – 2009. "Wireframe" 2004. – 2006. "New Gravity" 2000. – 2003. "Playmobil" 1999. – 2003. "Lego" 1994. – 1995. "Fragile" 1992. – 1994. "Handle with care" 1989. – 1993. Early works