doc. art. Sebastijan Dračić

Sebastijan Dračić was born in 1980 in Zagreb. He studied from 1994 to 1998 at the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb at the Department of Painting. He enrolled in the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2000, and graduated in 2006 in the class of Professor Zlatko Keser. He has been a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists since 2008 and the Croatian Association of Independent Artists from 2012 to 2016. He is an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He has been active on the art scene since 2003, and as part of his artistic activity he has realized 11 solo and about fifty group exhibitions. He has exhibited in Croatia (Zagreb, Varaždin, Rab, Zadar, Poreč, Pula and Rijeka) and abroad (Vienna, Skopje, Leipzig, Novi Sad, Ningbo, Milan, Gdansk, Herne, St, Polten, Trieste). He has also presented himself at several art fairs abroad. He participated in the residency programs Kulturkontakt 2009 in Vienna and One-sided story in Leipzig in 2012. He was twice a scholarship holder of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation from New York, in 2012 and 2019. His paintings are in private and public collections in Croatia and abroad.

I make cycles of paintings in which I deal with one or more related topics and, in terms of form and content, the images within the cycle should be viewed as part of a whole. The first cycle of paintings "8 x 8" was created from 2004 to 2007, then the cycle "Everyone for Himself" which was completed in 2010, followed by "The beginning and the end of the world" from 2011, "Grey" from 2014, and the last cycle "Kob" in 2022. I work in the technique of oil on canvas, and create images of distorted dreamlike spaces. The scenes that appear in my paintings do not evoke real places, but by merging real and imaginary segments, they emphasize the impression of a dreamlike atmosphere that draws the observer into intense, often astonishing spaces, which arise from fragments of the world in which we live. The themes I deal with in my painting are related to man; his relationship with nature, the relationship between the individual and society, and the ideas of utopias and dystopias and their intertwining. I use references in a wide field of culture, from ancient times to contemporary times, from high culture to pop culture, and the painting becomes a place where the past, present, future and fiction mix. The space within my paintings exists between dreams and reality, and it arises from fragments of the world in which we live. These are scenes of a possible past and the contours of an uncertain future.

I teach drawing subjects for the first and second year. Students draw a human figure by observation.

2022 – "Contemporary Croatian Painting – Between Abstraction and Figuration", Civico Museo Revoltella, Trieste, Italy 2021 – "Kob", Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 2019 – "Let them eat cake?", Art Pavilion in Zagreb 2015 – "2nd CEE Countries Contemporary Art Exhibition", Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo, China 2015 – "No Limit", Winarts Gallery & Zen Gallery, La Biblioteca Umanistica, Milan, Italy 2014 – Grey, Kranjčar Gallery, Zagreb 2011 – "The Beginning and the End of the World", Marisall Gallery, Zagreb 2011 – "The Other Reality: Croatian emerging painters", Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria 2010 – "Every One for Himself", SC Gallery, Zagreb 2009. – 14. Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean, National Gallery Skopje, Macedonia