ĐORĐE JANDRIĆ: KODIKAMO HRPA / FAR AND AWAY A HEAP*
*The original Croatian title is a play on words which integrates the word ‘code’ into the expression ‘far and away’.
on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, at 8:00 p. m.
Institute from Contemporary Art
Trg kralja Tomislava 20, Zagreb
The exhibition remains open until April 27, 2024.
Gallery opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 13:00 – 19:00
The gallery will be closed on Wednesday, April 17, 2024.
“Everything is a sculpture”, says Đorđe Jandrić in the conversation during preparations for his first exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
The exhibited drawings represent a set of natural numbers and zero – N0, and introduce the viewer to space and volume, perhaps time too, but also to the data stored on the Internet. They guide us via QR codes; far and away further than the two-dimensional surfaces of black and white drawings lead us at first glance.
The almost elementary art process is used to create the exhibits, pencil drawing on paper that doesn’t reveal from the first that it is an exhibition that also includes digital technology. Each drawing and each of the numbers, i.e. each of the heap of numbers, has three visual mutations, but in order to reveal all three to the viewer, a visit to the gallery and an Internet connection are required, without which the entire exhibition is not accessible. The sculpture is created in opposition to the material and immaterial parts of the work, the black and white flat drawing and its digital clone.
In Jandrić’s professional biography, it is stated that he studied architecture, which he abandoned in favour of studying sculpture, while never abandoning the basic principles of spatial thinking in his work. He is interested in numbers, drawing, geometry, space, volume, concept, analysis and context, in fact the basics of architectural design. When he introduced the idea of the Heap into his work 30 years ago, it was actually a reflection of the attitude that a heap of any material is a potential sculpture, and that sculpture can be made in any material and medium. The ideal heap shape is a cone. It is symbolized by a triangle, and inscribed in a circle inscribed in a square, it forms the almost Euclidean beginning of the analysis of structure, space and changes. A sculpture.
Đorđe Jandrić (Zadar, 1956) studied architecture at the University of Zagreb in 1975, but leaves it in 1978 when he enrolled at the Teaching Department at the Academy of Fine Arts, also in Zagreb, and studied art history at the Faculty of Philosophy. He graduated in 1985 (J. Biffel, J. Poljan).
He started exhibiting at the 13th Youth Salon in Zagreb in 1981, and to date has held thirty solo exhibitions and participated in around eighty group exhibitions in the country and abroad. He was the representative of the Republic of Croatia at the exhibition Statue and Object in Bratislava in 2005 and in Geneva at the Europart exhibition in 2008. As a representative of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, and as part of the cultural exchange between the two countries, he resides in Liechtenstein.
In his permanent research of the concept of sculpture, he expresses himself in almost all visual media (sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, video, film). In working on the film, he collaborates with several authors and in several capacities. He is the author of several sculptures in public spaces. In the period from 1992 to 1994, he was the graphic editor and designer of Kinoteka magazine. He is the author of the artwork for the monographic exhibition of Zlatko Bourek in the Art Pavilion in Zagreb in 2003, and co-author (with Z. Bourek) of the artwork for several other exhibitions.
From 1985 to 1991, he worked as a teacher, and in 1995 he began working as an assistant at the Faculty of Textiles Technology of the University of Zagreb, where he was promoted to assistant professor in 2007. In the same year, he transferred to the Academy of Applied Arts of the University of Rijeka, where he worked as a full-time professor until his retirement in 2022. He lives and works in Zagreb.
Support:
City of Zagreb
Ministry of Culture and Media