David Maljković

Retired Compositions, 2008

Collage on paper
70 x 100 cm, Framed: 74.6 x 105.7 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

The collages Retired Compositions use Vojin Bakic´’s sculptural form in relation both to Memorial Park Dotršcina and to EXAT 51. The artistic group EXAT 51 (short for Experimental Atelier) was a group of artists and architects that was active in Zagreb in the first half of the 1950’s in the then dominating socialist realism surroundings. Their program was to obtain legitimacy for abstract art, as well as equal evaluation of “pure” and “applied” art i.e. the synthesis of all visual arts. The idea itself was taken over from the heritage of the Russian Constructivist avant-garde and Bauhaus experience. In the 1950s, it was present also in other areas. The objective was an organic integration of various artistic forms that related to social development and its needs. To this end, the EXAT 51 Group was making efforts to involve artists in the shaping of the immediate objective and spatial reality, with the advantage being given to experimental and creative approach to the work.
(Metro Pictures Gallery)
In everyday life, the difference between hearing and understanding hardly exists. Rather, normality is the special condition of undoing, of closing this gap. It is only in aesthetic experience, in relation to the past or when common sense is being transgressed, that the projective imagination, fantasy and fiction that are at play in our relations and making sense of the world are peeled off the visible surfaces and proofs to have a life of their own (as do objects which are consequently no longer held together by a meaningful frame).
(Anselm Franke)

David Maljković, *1973 Rijeka, Croatia