Expert associate: Viktor Popović

Exhibition set-up: Jasminka Babić, Viktor Popović

Curatorial assistant: Ana Čukušić

The year-end exhibition in 2021, in which the Museum of Fine Arts celebrates its ninetieth anniversary, is dedicated to the exceptional oeuvre of Gorki Žuvela – an artist who, in his almost fifty-year-long artistic career, has permanently changed the artistic and cultural life of Split with his dedicated educational and tireless cultural engagement. As early as the mid-1970s, after having returned to Split from Zagreb, Žuvela became an indispensable part, and usually also the driving force of the cultural scene in Split, and although he has regularly shown his artwork in solo and group exhibitions, his entire oeuvre has not been presented in Split before now. Žuvela’s retrospective in the Museum of Fine Arts is therefore a singular opportunity to showcase this extremely prolific, complex and diverse artistic oeuvre, but also to examine his work as one of the indispensable, truly significant and intriguing artistic practices that marked the late 20th and the turn of the 21th century in Croatian art in general.

Dajana Džafo’s new series of prints is conceived as a collage of her personal memories, but as she points out, not necessarily based on real stories or events from the past. They are abstract, intuitive and represent a wide range of manifestations such as images, thoughts, desires, emotions, feelings and so on. If we consider the concept of memory not exclusively as an act whereby conscious past states re-emerge in our consciousness, but try to interpret it through the unconscious part of human personality that is out of touch with reality, logic or social norms then we will come closer to understanding the poetics of Dajana’s expression in this game of assembling associative forms.

The author of this year’s intervention in the Chapel of St. Arniro is Viktor Popović, an artist from Split who approaches the motif of the Nativity scene on an entirely symbolic level. Instead of setting up the usual traditional figural representation, the artist transforms the entire space with a simple, minimal light intervention. He sets up a floating circle in space, made of luminous argon tubes that clearly evokes the motif of an aureole or the holy circle as a symbol of holiness and eternity. Using only light, the artist clearly points to its symbolism of the creation of life and the highest state of the divine. In contrast to the present-day that is prone to exaggeration and superficiality, the artist insists on an extremely simple motif and exclusively white light, thereby creating a space of contemplation, peace, sublimity and modesty, recalling the fundamental values of Christmas as a celebration of life and light.

After the well-received exhibition of works by Tony Cragg in 2019, the audience in Split and Croatia will now, for the first time, have an opportunity to get acquainted with the work of another extremely important and internationally renowned British sculptor, Richard Deacon. The exhibition staged in the Kula Gallery and the atrium of the Museum of Fine Arts will present, through a selection of 22 works created in the last twenty years, different aspects of Deacon’s exceptionally interesting oeuvre.

Installation A possible landscape (Split version) is a part of the project Exhibition continues which focused on Aballi's work of the past fifteen years and presented journey through his aesthetic preferences in contemplating the conventional systems of production of the work of art.