The Kožarić Studio

 

The Kožarić Studio

The Kožarić Studio contains more than 6000 exhibits: sculptures, reliefs, assemblages, objects, installations, ready-mades, paintings, prints, drawings, sketches, and many practical objects, as well as those that are not easily classified as artefacts but will perhaps be transformed into such with some future gesture of the artist. 

Elaborating, restructuring, forgetting, gilding, incorporating into new entities, discarding, piling up... these are only some of the artistic gestures that have appeared and alternated at 12 Medulićeva Street in the last forty some years. The space has functioned as a studio in the classic sense of the word, but you would not be mistaken to see it as a peculiar platform for continuous fluctuations of energy, or at least a repository for what remains afterward. It is far from easy to establish a chronology in this chaos, and perhaps it is not even necessary. The tendency to discard one's own past, to display a kind of negligence towards it, to resort to recycling, may reveal a resistance to the solidification of the personal myth or, alternatively, the need to consecrate everyday life.

Those who have paid an occasional visit to the studio may have noticed the peculiar atmosphere of its interior, which keeps changing with every new arrival, transforming itself into new arrangements without any particular sense visible from the outside. The Museum's archive preserves some photographs from 1990: they were taken on two different occasions that year, in winter and in spring. Three years later, artist and curator Antun Maračić contributed to the perception and conception of that unusual space (which Kožarić himself has called "the revivification laboratory") as one of permanent change by a radical gesture of dislocation. In 1993, the entire studio was transferred to the Zvonimir Gallery, along with the artist, of course, who temporarily changed his address and continued his work at the gallery venue. In 2002, his studio changed address once again: it was moved to Kassel for Documenta 11, down to the last artefact. In 2007, the Municipal Department of Culture in Zagreb purchased the entire studio and gave it to MSU for permanent management and maintenance.

The Kožarić Studio contains more than 6000 exhibits: sculptures, reliefs, assemblages, objects, installations, ready-mades, paintings, prints, drawings, sketches, and many practical objects, as well as those that are not easily classified as artefacts but will perhaps be transformed into such with some future gesture of the artist. The oldest exhibits date from the late 1940s, from the time when Kožarić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. The youngest are of a very recent date, even from the time after the acquisition of the studio.

 

Contact:

Collection manager: Iva Radmila Janković, senior curator iva.rada.jankovic@msu.hr