Location: University Gallery and University of Split, Ruđera Boškovića 31

Date: February 15 - March 7, 2024

The exhibition is a result of collaboration with ARtHESIS, an artistic organization for contemporary music and visual arts. In the realm of visual arts, ARTHESIS promotes art that is not heavily politically engaged but rather relies on very similar aesthetic principles as music, emphasizing composition, color, spirituality, and artists who communicate their inner world through traditional mediums such as painting or sculpture as a reflection of the external. They find different ways of communicating with the audience compared to the engaged and critical art prevailing in recent decades.

This exhibition brings together five Split-based artists with different artistic perspectives, orientations, and aesthetics: Karin Grenc, Marinko Jelača, Jakša Matošić, Velebit Restović, and Jadranka Štrbić Krstičević.

Branka Hlevnjak, an art history professor and art critic, wrote in the exhibition's preface: "It's difficult to give this group of artists a common denominator. The only thing connecting them is Split, the city where they operate, and whose vibrant artistic scene inspires them. Some of them are also connected by Sarajevo, as a place of education, a city that also has a strong contemporary art scene. They are tied by distinct individuality, or pluralism, as the phenomenon of increasingly original and authorially different styles and methods of expression was called in the 1980s. Ambiguity is manifested through the blending of media: from classical painting and design to performances and ambient art, from installations to light and music. In this connection of different expressions, art obviously approaches its source through art as magic, therapy, healing, as a method of strengthening collective consciousness that aims to dispel evil and evoke good vibrations.

Supernatural figurative forms in abstract space (Velebit Restović, Jadranka Štrbić Krstičević), colors and graphics in confrontation, personal experiences of reality with a dose of humor and irony (Marinko Jelača), chaotic splatters depicting unusual portraits (Karin Grenc) – all contribute in their original way to the experience of the aesthetics of the new millennium, blending unexpected chaos and subtle order, painting, graphics, and design, and finally music, as part of the artistic personality (Jakša Matošić). From these works, the breath of the Mediterranean does not emerge, as one might expect, but rather the spirit of a broad international art scene."