Dora Kovačević – Garden – Drawing Exhibition
Thursday, 12 July 2018, 9:00 PM
Croatian Natural History Museum, Demetrova 1, Upper Town / Museum Atrium
Nature, the wondrous beauty of flowers, leaves, plants, birds, insects, shells, and the floral motifs of Croatian ethnographic heritage are the starting points that lead the artist from one drawing to the next. The drawings, embroidered with pen strokes on white paper, sometimes perforated and sometimes featuring three-dimensional applications of reduced leaf or flower motifs, weave a story that returns Dora to the childhood world of her first encounters with handicrafts. From that moment begins a long voyage, and the drawings become safe harbours.
This is the ninth exhibition in a series dedicated to the academic painter and printmaker Izabela Šimunović (1970–2010) – Šimunović, Filakovac, Krašković, Dolić, Milenković, Kuliš, Ujević, Jurić – through which Scena Amadeo and the Croatian Natural History Museum present visual artists whose works are inspired by natural history themes.
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Nature, the wondrous beauty of flowers, leaves, plants, birds, insects, shells, and the floral motifs of Croatian ethnographic heritage are the starting points that lead me from one drawing to the next.
The drawings, embroidered with pen strokes on white paper, sometimes perforated and sometimes featuring three-dimensional applications of reduced leaf or flower motifs, weave a story that returns me to the childhood world of my first encounters with handicrafts. From that moment begins a long voyage, and the drawings become safe harbours.
Dora Kovačević
What does lightning do in the sky? It writes, breaks the line, moves at the speed of disappearance. Where it stops, it continues in the invisible. Several decades ago, Dora Kovačević stopped a bolt of lightning on the ground—it became the sharp and precise logo of the factory bearing the same name. Regardless of the volumes (the sculptures) the painter/sculptor has created since then, it is as though she has never stopped capturing and following the line. That flash between surface and space could only be caught within the labyrinths beyond the visible. There, the dramatic, expressive trace of lightning softened its sharpness, multiplied its paths, shifted its destinations: it became a kind of connective tissue on a surface that perforations often designate as the “middle layer”—between what lies beneath, what lies above, and where the action takes place.
The memory of lightning comes to mind because Dora Kovačević’s labyrinth seemingly offers only tenderness. These are the endless stitches of a castle maiden atop a tower, the paths of a gardener in a wondrous garden, flowerbeds from a tapestry, music-guided threads from Eastern weavings, lace made of thread and air, illuminations from the Dark Ages… Hidden away, almost like diary entries, are mnemonic beings of importance: tiny insects, birds, delicate plants… Drawings made of scales and petals, of insects and ants that embroider through movement, seem like the result of advanced technology. And they are. Like the works mentioned in the comparisons above, they are the product of a perfectly precise hand and an exceptionally patient spirit. They are proof of the existence of the substance of time.
Yet this beautiful tenderness is neither flat nor unambiguous. The motif from the “embroidered” surface crosses into space; shifts in symmetry—signs of craftsmanship—are joined by a dynamic and sometimes tense relationship between the undulating and the crystalline, the organic and the geometric. Colour (red) dares to enter the black-and-white duality, while the hardness of other materials (silver metal clasps) enters the pure and fragile paper. Light unexpectedly intensifies the depth of the scene. This abstract world, a stylisation of many experiences, now and then opens a glimpse into a thornier layer that the artist leaves beneath the surface.
Severity and lyricism, patient passion, an almost exorcistically persistent handwriting, a certain fierce tranquillity: Dora Kovačević’s drawings offer beauty and serenity, but they are by no means intended for a first glance.
Željka Čorak
BIOGRAPHY
Dora Kovačević was born in Dubrovnik in 1951.
She graduated in printmaking from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1974 and in sculpture from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1977. She is a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She has held seventeen solo exhibitions and participated in more than one hundred and fifty group exhibitions.
Her first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1977. At the Gallery Forum Studio in Zagreb in 1978 she exhibited mobile polychrome wooden sculptures, and in 1979 wooden sculptures at the Vladimir Nazor Gallery.
In 1985 she presented a cycle of paper sculptures at Gallery Forum.
Her 1998 solo exhibition Space of Sound – Space of Silence at the Šovagović Gallery featured sculptures containing sound elements of musical instruments within their structure.
The exhibition Black and White at Gallery Karas in 2001 and the Vukovar City Museum in 2004 presented a series of reliefs—spatial graphics.
The exhibition of wooden reliefs Calendar at the Glyptotheque in Zagreb in 2009 explored the theme of the changing seasons.
With an exhibition at Gallery Kaj in Zagreb in 2009 she began a cycle of large tapestries, continuing it with Paradise Garden at the St. Chrysogonus Gallery in Šibenik in 2010 and an exhibition at Zlatá Koruna Monastery in the Czech Republic in 2011.
She created a spatial drawing installation at the Gastatelier in Düsseldorf in 2011.
In 2017 she presented the exhibition Petit Point at Gallery AŽ in Zagreb.
Dora Kovačević has received sixteen awards and recognitions, including the Young Artists Salon Award (1977 and 1986), the Zagreb Salon Proposal Award (1987), the Small Sculpture Biennial Award in Murska Sobota (1979), the City of Zagreb Souvenir Award marking the city’s 900th anniversary (2003), the 1st Croatian Drawing Biennial Award (1996), and the award at the Passion Heritage visual arts competition on the theme of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection (2002).
She has created seventeen large-scale sculptures in bronze, stone, wood and concrete for public spaces, city parks and international sculpture symposia.
Her wooden sculpture Opening was installed in 1983 in the atrium of the City Assembly in Velika Gorica. At the Forma Viva International Sculpture Symposium in Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia, she created the wooden sculpture Wall. At the Mediterranean Sculpture Symposium in Labin in 1997, the first section of the monumental stone mosaic White Road (5 × 25 m) was completed. She also realised concrete sculptures in Park Mladosti in Zagreb (1987), Jakovlje Castle Park (1999), and the Sculpture Alley on the Sava embankment (2010).
She is also the author of works in the field of small sculpture. To mark the return to Vukovar in 2000, her White Vukovar Dove was produced in paper and distributed to thousands of addresses.
Alongside sculpture, she has continuously worked in drawing as an independent artistic discipline, as well as in printmaking.
The works of Dora Kovačević are held in numerous museum and public collections and are also included in Croatian encyclopaedias.
LIST OF WORKS
1–50
GARDEN (2015–2018)
drawings in ink and technical pen, coloured inks, coloured pencils
perforations, applications, metal clasps
Fabriano watercolour paper, 300 g
700 × 500 mm
51
FLOWER BIRD (2018)
painted wood
24 × 27 × 9 cm
52–63
HERITAGE (2015)
drawings in ink and technical pen
Fabriano watercolour paper, 300 g
500 × 350 mm
Authors
Dora Kovačević