Newspaper Art by Tomislav Gotovac
9 October – 24 October 2014
P74 Gallery, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition Newspaper Art by Tomislav Gotovac on Thursday, 9 October 2014 at 19.00 at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana.
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition there will be a public lecture on Tomislav Gotovac’s artistic work held by Darko Šimičić at 18.00h.
Despite the fact that Tomislav Gotovac was consistently present in the national (Croatian and Yugoslav) and international art scene, it’s only been in recent years (especially after his death in 2010) that we can observe an increased interest in his work. A series of solo exhibitions in elite Western private galleries and museums in Paris, New York, Washington, Vienna, Rio de Janiero as well as the inclusion of his works in numerous collections are testimony to this. He is undoubtedly one of the most radical and most important multimedia and conceptual artists and directors of avant-garde films in the region. His importance was also decisive for the younger generation of artists of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s who were active in the fields of performance arts, visual arts, new media and film.
The films and visual art works of Tomislav Gotovac are tightly intertwined and create an inseparable whole. Especially interesting is the use of the newspaper in his artistic opus. He used printed matter in different ways: newspapers served him as material for collages, as visual material in photographs and films and as a medium of communication and distribution for his artistic projects. For him, an announcement in a newspaper had the same significance as a street action or performance art.
His works and tests were published in the Belgrade student bulletins Student and Vidici. At the end of the 1980s he created a number of works in the Zagreb youth and student newspapers Polet and Studentski list. These were deliberate media and art projects where the artistic work was made in collaboration with a group of collaborators (photographers, costume designers, prop makers, designers). Part of Gotovac’s activity in mass media expanded into performative acts: into the actions of selling/distributing of the newspaper, which he converted into spectacular performance art. Not only did it represent an exceptional example of testing the borders of censorship, or rather, the borders of freedom of the press, but also represented a ground-breaking example of media strategy in art.
The exhibition, prepared in cooperation with curator and critic Darko Šimičić, is an important pioneering venture, since this segment of Gotovac’s artistic work has never been researched or presented in a museum. It focuses on the artworks that Gotovac created in the 1960s, that is, at the very beginning of his artistic career, while studying film directing in Belgrade. The exhibition includes archival material, newspapers, publications and photo-documentation of artistic actions and similar.
All of the exhibited works have been made available with the kind assistance of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute and are the property of the artist’s daughter Sarah Gotovac. The basic task of the Institute Tomislav Gotovac is the preservation, research, production and distribution of his artistic legacy.
Welcome!
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The programme of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and by the Municipality of Ljubljana, Department for Culture.