Mladen Lučić

Zlatko Kopljar abstained from painting for about thirty years, expressing himself through performance, photography, video, and film. The last paintings of his that I remember were from the Sacrifice cycle (1992, mixed media on canvas, 190 x 250 cm), presented at the major exhibition New Croatian Art by Igor Zidić at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb in 1993. These paintings represented a certain experiment, both in the materials they were made from and thematically, because the motif was an abstract, most often Art Informelian stain that lived in harmony with a geometric raster or a monochrome dark surface. Given his ease in handling large formats, originality in compositional solutions, and refined execution, it was clear that Kopljar had a strong painterly vocation. However, he soon abandoned pa­inting and dedicated himself to other visual expressions, later explaining: “…At one point, I realized that performance was the best form for what I wanted to communicate. I found it very interesting to engage directly with the audience. I continued doing performances until, during one particular piece, I felt discomfort. Later, I moved into photography, video, and film, still with a performative foundation, even creating objects and sculptures. It’s possible that my choice was also influenced by the fact that I didn’t have suitable working conditions for painting.” During his thirty-year period away from painting, Kopljar succe­ssfully built his art using contemporary media, primarily focusing on social discourse. His main interests were the position of the individual in relation to centers of power, drawing attention to the social status of the artist and his relationship with museums, galleries, and market institutions, as well as broader issues related to a dehumanized global society. In various cycles, he created numerous anthological works, not using activist, but rather intellectually and aesthetically rounded artistic languages. Although he abandoned painting, he never fully renounced it, and it occasionally manifests in his performances and photography. I also believe that two of his video works evoke pa­inting in a certain way. In the video K21 Random Empty (2016), red, green, and blue colors emerge alternately from dominant black. Besides being complementary, these are also the primary colors for creating the color spectrum in television and video images (RGB). While this work analyzes the medium itself, in my view, the artist also comments on monochrome painting, as this video complements (or is part of) an installation consisting of two hollow concrete objects. This work, in turn, metaphorically connects to the previous piece, K20, which presents models of two of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art muse­ums and symbols of institutional power: New York’s MoMA and London’s Tate Modern. The artist cast these museums in concrete, sealing all entrances and enclosing them with walls, illustrating his perspective on leading museum institutions as closed and exclusive systems.This theme is also evident in his earlier work, K4, created for the 2002 exhibition Here Tomorrow. For that project, he blocked the main entrance of the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (then still located in Kulmer Palace on Katarina Square) with a twelve-ton concrete block. The hollow concrete block in K21 Random Empty speaks to the emptiness that results from museum institutions prioritizing power and money over art itself. This is why I believe that K21 Random Empty foreshadows a future where painting, if Kopljar’s predictions come true (and we are increasingly heading in that direction), will only be accessible virtually, mediated through electronic media. Another video work that could be associated with painting is K9 (2003), part of a photo­graphic series showing the artist in a black suit, kneeling with his head bowed on a white handkerchief amid heavy traffic in front of emblematic buildings and landmarks in New York. 

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Sandra Uskoković

” Teorija traume nas uči da je prošlost takoreći urezana u sadašnjost. No, kod traume ne postoji linearno kronološko vrijeme, jer je traumatski događaj uvijek podjednako ispred i iza nas.^[1] Stoga nam umjetnost predočava ono što nam inače promiče, ili postaje nevidljivo protokom vremena. Riječima Jacquesa Derride: “Memorija nam dolazi u tragovima; to su tragovi prošlosti koji nikad nisu bili sadašnjost, tragovi koji nikad ne ostvaruju oblik sadašnjosti, ali nam trajno (pre)ostaju kako bi zadobili oblik budućnosti.”^[2]

Za razliku od ograničenja zapadnjačkog shvaćanja memorije, pogotovo Aristotelovog modela koji objašnjava memorijska mjesta kao pasivne površine ili objekte utisnute u prošlost, gdje memorija zadobiva značenje palimpsesta, instalacija K-19 Zlatka Kopljara iz 2014.godine, postavljena na kružnom perimetru Meštovićevog paviljona u Zagrebu,  animira višestrukost prostora i vremena u memoriji, a memorija se otkriva samim procesom stvaranja, transformiranja, izražavanja i prenošenja prošlosti u sadašnjost. 

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Ory Dessau / 2019

In 2002 Zlatko Kopljar blocked the main entrance to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. He did so with a twelve-ton block of reinforced concrete, corresponding in size to the measurements of the building’s doorway. Titled K4(1998–2002), the action was part of the group exhibition Here Tomorrow, in which curator Roxana Marcoci offered an examination of the contemporary Croatian art scene seven years after the end of the war in former Yugoslavia. However, since it kept the museum closed and inaccessible, the protective concrete shield of Kopljar’s K4implied that even in 2002 the war was not over yet. By sealing its entrance Kopljar referred to the museum as if situated in a stage prior to demolition. He marked the museum’s building as a future ruin among already existing ruins. Likewise, Kopljar’s sealed entrance also suggested that the premises were being purged, purified of the near past sediments and ghosts of the war.  

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Sanja Cvetnić / 2019

The fate of each artist is situated somewhere between the oft-cited words of Martha Graham, “No artist is ahead of his time. He is the time. It is just that others are behind the time”, and, perhaps even more well-known, and certainly more enduring, is the Old Testament wisdom – “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun”(Eccl. 1:9): this reflects the fates of artists who have been cursed and of those who have been divinized. Zlatko Kopljar (1962) is one of those artists who most profoundly experiences both fateful points, as well as the tension between both statements concerning artistic and human existence. In a quick survey of his oeuvre, if we filter by the key words of “time” and “artist”, many of his works apply. We encounter these elements in an art installation (1993) named after an inscription engraved on a metallic plate, Panta rhei (Τα Πάντα ῥεῖ), in which the beginning of one ofthe most famous Greek philosophical sentences is reinforced by the high voltage with which the work is charged and in an abstract video, K9 (2003), to which the artist’s own DNA forms the key. We see the topics “time” and “artist” in the tableaux vivantsportraying a company of “dead” painters in a series of photographic portraits of colleagues, maverick artists all, in K11(2007). And we find these elements in the striking stills from the performance K16(2012), in which Kopljar, dressed in his silver, phosphorescent suit, digs himself a deep grave that slowly swallows him up, along with the light that reflects off  his silver suit, glowing to the end, like a big firefly in the darkness.

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Kate Christina Mayne / 2020

In an upstairs gallery of MSU, Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art, honey floods over a smallish, solid-steel, rectangular prism. The light reflects off the volume, through the faintly golden substance, and lends the sculpture an air of a sumptuous jewel. This combination of fluid and solid substance overrides any thoughts of minimalism that might be tacked onto it: the properties of honey suggest the touch of a finger or a fleck of dust could desecrate its presence. The two materials are distinct, yet both have their own relationship to fluidity, if at different temperatures. We might be forgiven for wondering if some kind of alchemical exercise were at hand. It has no title. Onlookers have very little concrete reference to go by, other than the object itself, which just lies there, basking in inquisitive, inexplicable beauty. 

Read More “Reflections on a trail of blazing light”