2026 Radoslav Putar Award Finalists for the have been selected.
This year, the Institute for Contemporary Art announced the 25th competition for the annual award for artists under 40, the Radoslav Putar Award.
Finalists for the 2026 Radoslav Putar Award:
DINA GLIGO, Zagreb (1986.)
IVAN GUNDIĆ, Koprivnica (1993.)
NIKOLINA KUZMIĆ, Split (1994.)
KRISTIJAN POPOVIĆ, Brdovec (1998.)
2026 Radoslav Putar Award Jury Members:
Vladimir Novak
artist, Zagreb, 2025 Radoslav Putar Award Winer
Petra Dolanjski Harni
curator, Head of Gallery Windows, open call for curators up to 40 years of age, Zagreb
Sabina Oroshi
curator, Museo Lapidarium, Novigrad /Cittanova, open call for curators up to 40 years of age
Darko Šimičić
Head of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb
Maria Vassileva
curator, Head of the BAZA Award, Sofia, Bulgaria
The announcement of the winner will be held at Salon Galć in Split, organized by HULU-Split, on Friday, June 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM, with the opening of the Finalists 2026 exhibition.
DINA GLIGO (1986.)
She obtained an MFA in Sculpture in 2012. She is active as an artist in the areas of visual, digital and net art; works as a digital artisan and a non-profit cultural program producer.
She is co-founder and the Artistic Director of Format C, an artist organization focused on digital art, experimental multimedia research and collaborative creation.
She continuously curates the Inquiry Inc. digital (collaborative) culture production (since 2016), Fubar glitch art festival (est. 2015), the Pivilion networked art project (since 2016), and many more.
The focus of her art practice is on working with digital systems and infrastructures as spaces for creation, communication and collaboration. Since 2015, through the long-term project Pivillion, I have been actively developing processes that examine how the latest technologies can support the action and gathering of temporary communities around open, distributed and variable media. (In collaboration with Vedran Gligo.) At the center of her interest are not objects, but protocols and the ways in which information, creativity and authorship move through the system of artistic production.
IVAN GUNDIĆ (1993.)
He completed his undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Political Science and earned a master’s degree in photography from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. He is the recipient of two Rector’s Awards and a Dean’s Award for his graduate thesis. He has received numerous recognitions, including an award at the International Student Biennial, a prize from the Museum of Fine Arts as part of the 36th Youth Salon of the Croatian Association of Artists, the Grand Prix at the Sarajevo Photography Festival, and an Ex Aequo award at the 29th Slavonian Biennial.
His artistic practice is based on the medium of photography, though he rarely uses it in a traditional form. In addition to photography, he works with other media such as sound, video, and performance. His work focuses on themes of memory, language, society, and identity, with a particular emphasis on exploring the relationship between people and images, both in personal and intimate contexts and within a broader social framework.
Alongside his artistic practice, he is also actively engaged in education. Since 2021, he has worked as an artist-mentor and lecturer within the contemporary photography school Drugi kadar.
NIKOLINA KUZMIĆ (1984.)
She studied at the Split Academy of Arts, undergraduate studies, and graduated in 2016 in the class of Prof. Dean Jokanović Toumin. She graduated from the Split Academy of Arts, graduate studies in 2019 in the class of Prof. Nina Ivančić. She attended the Art, Science and Health Master of ArtsOnline Pilot Course, in 2022. She was Radoslav Putar Award Finalist 2024.
Her work is based on playing with classic museum presentations, and one of the aspects that intrigues her is the space that refers to various heterotopias, whether it is archives, museums, cemeteries, as well as hospitals and personal collections. Another element that marks her artistic creativity is the living physical body, that is, the organism in its matter – flesh, genes, bones and skin.
KRISTIJAN POPOVIĆ (1998.)
He graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, 2025, in the class of Associate Professor Predrag Pavić. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2023/2024. Since 2018 he has been actively involved in set design for theatre and film. He has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions and staged three solo ones in Zagreb. He has received University Rector’s Award (2021/2022), third prize at the Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum Ivan Kožarić Awards for young artists (2022), first prize in the Starter Prize competition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (2023), and a Summa cum laude from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2024.
He tends to research social issues and situations that arise within the specific context of the place where he resides. He works conceptually, often using performance, sculpture, art books and installations. He often uses humour and irony to make his works more accessible to the audience, without diminishing the complexity of the problem. His education in theatre and film scenography helps him shape the way he approaches space, by combining conceptual thinking with spatial and performative strategies, he constructs participatory situations.
More about the Jury Members:
Vladimir Novak. Winner of the Radoslav Putar Award 2025. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in 2017, and has been an associate at the Sculpture Department since 2022 with the title of assistant professor. He is continuously and actively participating in the art scene, presenting his works at several group and solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. He was a Finalist for the Radoslav Putar Award 2022. He works at the intersection of plastic design, architecture, design, light and sound in the relationship between space-media-observer experience.
Petra Dolanjski Harni (1987) holds a Master’s degree in Art History and Croatian Language and Literature Education (2012), and a Master’s degree in Museology and Heritage Management and a Master’s degree in Library Science (2014), from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. She is currently a doctoral student at the Postgraduate Program in Information and Communication Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.
She is the head of the Prozori Gallery and a senior librarian at the Adult Department of the S. S. Kranjčević Library, Zagreb City Library. As the head of the Prozori Gallery, she conceives, curates and implements the year-round exhibition program and accompanying educational and discursive programs, and edits the annual catalogs and other publications of the Prozori Gallery.
As an art critic, she regularly publishes texts on Croatian Radio, the Third Program Triptych. She is a member of the HS AICA. She is the author and participant in several librarian-curator research projects.
Sabina Oroshi is a curator and art historian whose practice unfolds in dialogue between international and Croatian art contexts. She focuses on contemporary artistic practices engaging with ecology, post-socialist cultural transformations, and institutional critique.
Her work develops through exhibitions and long-term research projects that connect artistic practice with ecological and social questions. She is particularly interested in formats that emerge through collaboration, collective processes, and sustained work with artists over time. She regularly works with emerging artists across exhibitions, residencies, and international projects.
She is a co-founder of the curatorial collective Collective Rewilding and currently works as a curator at the Lapidarium Museum and Rigo Gallery in Novigrad.
Darko Šimičić is a curator, collector and cultural worker.
He is a co-founder of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute in Zagreb, where he works as a project manager and researcher. He has been the secretary of the association since its founding in 2012, and has been the president of the Institute since 2021.
He was a program manager at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (later: Institute for Contemporary Art) in Zagreb (1994–2006). He worked in the documentation department of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (2006–2009). He is a member of the Croatian section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
He was a member of the project team for the retrospective exhibition of Tomislav Gotovac (Rijeka, Usti nad Labem, Ljubljana, 2017 – 2018) and one of the editors of the books Tomislav Gotovac: Anticipator kriza, published by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka 2017, and Slobodan Šijan: Tomislav Gotovac – Life as a Film Experiment, Zagreb 2018. He was a collaborator on the exhibition Tomislav Gotovac a.k.a. Antonio G. Lauer: Ascending and Descending Genealogy held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2024.
He is the author of numerous texts published in catalogues, books and digital media. He has curated a number of exhibitions and given professional lectures in the country and abroad. He is an independent researcher; his topics of interest are historical avant-garde (Zenitism, Dada, photomontage), neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s (Gorgona, Mangelos, Group of Six Authors, Tomislav Gotovac) and the media of photography and artist books.
Maria Vassileva (born 1961 in Sofia; lives and works in Sofia) is a curator, art historian, and critic. She graduated in Art History from the National Art Academy in 1984 and received her PhD in Art History in 2007.
Vassileva has undertaken a number of international specializations, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), the Institute for the History of Art at the University of Rochester, USA (1999), the Central European University in Budapest (2002), and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York (2002).
She is a co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia and a curator of the “8th of March” Group. From 1998 to 2015, she served as Chief Curator at the Sofia City Art Gallery, where in 2006 she established the “Contemporary Art and Photography” collection. Between 2016 and 2017, she was Chief Curator at the National Gallery, Sofia.
Since 2010, she has managed the Edmond Demirdjian Foundation, dedicated to supporting young artists. She has initiated and developed key programs and awards for emerging artists, including the BAZA Award for Contemporary Art.
She is the founder and director of Structura Gallery (2018–2025).
Vassileva has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions featuring Bulgarian and international artists. She is the author of several books on modern and contemporary art, as well as many essays and articles published in catalogues, magazines, and newspapers.