Ars Adriatica, No. 7, 2017.
Essays
https://doi.org/10.15291/ars.1397
The Mobile Artist-Nomad: On the 96th Birthday of Academic Artist Ivan Kožarić
Ivica Župan
; independent researcher
Abstract
In terms of cultural and ideological disposition, Kožarić is an artist who emphasizes the speculative and psychological aspect of artistic creation. As a dynamic author of wide conceptual and sculptural range, with an extraordinary stylistic evolution and thematic physiognomy, he has created a considerable and exquisite body of creative proofs on his own intellectual and ethical existence. His magnificent oeuvre is laden with challenges, with unique intellectual, ontological, phenomenological, aesthetical, moral, and cultural meanings and values. It is a huge and original contribution to Croatian art, as well as one of its greatest and most far-reaching productions from the second half of the 20th century, an opus that condenses and combines numerous issues that are typical of the global high-modernist and then postmodernist situations. This radical individualist, known for his anarchic behaviour, has reached the position of high esteem in contemporary Croatian art and the status of an exquisite phenomenon on the art scene – as the iconic features of his artistic handwriting have long been recognized in Croatia and are today gaining appreciation on the global level as well – owing to his unique artistic stance, an opus of inimitable conceptual and sculptural-phenomenological structure, and an individualist position in his recent creative transformations. Avoiding all definite poetic, thematic, iconographic, or formal sculptural stereotypes and constants, he has consciously broken up with the production of aesthetical objects that would cater to any particular taste or code of stylistic or formal innovation, or generally fit the strict prerogatives of the artistic disciplines in which he creates. He keeps evading everything that an art tradition consists of, even his own formalized or verified artistic handwriting.
Keywords
Nomadism; nomadic path; appropriation; accumulation; ready-made; assemblage; neo-Dadaism
Hrčak ID:
191270
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2017.
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