On Thursday, April 2nd, starting at 7 p.m., the opening of the exhibition “Searching for Homeland” by Zdravko Mirčeta will take place in the Pavilion in the Fortress. The exhibition consists of paintings from the artist’s recent work.
Zdravko Mirčeta was born in 1951 in Miočić, Dalmatia. He graduated from the School of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. He graduated in 1978 from the Department of Graphic Design at the Academy of Arts in Zagreb.
In addition to his fine art, he has also achieved notable results in the fields of graphic design, television and theater set design, and heraldry. He has designed a large number of posters, newspapers, literary publications, and other printed publications. He has received several awards for his work.
He exhibited in many cities of Yugoslavia and Serbia (Šibenik, Split, Benkovac, Zagreb, Varaždin, Knin, Dubrovnik, Trebinje, Banja Luka, Laktasi, Belgrade, Lazarevci, Kragujevac, Niš, Požarevac, Apatin, Raška), as well as abroad (Essen/ Germany; Dijon/France; Stockholm/Sweden…). He has the status of an independent artist. He lives and works in Belgrade and Stockholm.
The exhibition in Niš, since it is based on the latest paintings of Zdravko Mirčeta, represents a striking cross-section of the current poetics of the artist who has been present on our art scene for decades. Genre-oriented towards landscape, these works are stylistically and formally moving around an imaginary line between the associative and the abstract, with a greater or lesser approximation to one or the other expression. The landscape is decoded by painting means into planes of interconnected organic forms or is sublimated to the level of connecting horizontal fields. The painted matter rests on the interaction of multi-layered painted surfaces and freely placed “sharp” lines that give the entire scene a constructivist structure. The degree of illusoryness grows at the expense of physical persuasiveness. The diversity of motifs causes expressive – creative amplitude, so the stroke varies from energetic and fast to calm and controlled, and the achieved atmosphere from dramatic to lyrically elegiac. In a word, the landscape is transformed into a complex emotional, symbolic and visual experience. The title of the cycle itself (Searching for Homeland) and the personal fate of the artist, who, due to the disintegration of the former country, was displaced from his own homeland (Dalmatian hinterland and Knin), allow the conclusion that these works, at their semantic level, imply a symbolic consideration of the issue of homeland as a cultural phenomenon and metaphorically testify to the fate of the displaced who, in their intimate emotional and thought code, strive to unite the two often opposed worlds that mark them. With the stroke of the brush, Zdravko Mirčet seems to symbolically record the dramaturgy of life.
The exhibition will run until April 21.