Trieste, Studio Tommaseo,
from 28 February to 8 April 2025

Đorđe Jandrić
Kodikamo hrpa / The heap, encoded

 

Đorđe Jandrić, a drawing from the series The heap, encoded, 2024 (photograph by Darko Bavoljak, courtesy Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb)

 

 

Trieste Contemporanea is pleased to present, in co-production with the Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the exhibition by Đorđe Jandrić Kodikamo hrpa / The heap, encoded, a project that explores the boundary between physical and digital art.

The exhibition is organized as part of the “Dialogues with the Art of Central Eastern Europe 2025” with the contribution of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (and under the collective brand Io Sono Friuli Venezia Giulia) and with the collaboration of Studio Tommaseo.

The inauguration is scheduled for Friday, February 28 at 6:00 pm in via del Monte 2/1 in the presence of the Croatian artist and the curator of the exhibition Janka Vukmir who in a short conversation will introduce the public to Jandrić’s artistic world.

 

Jandrić presents in Trieste two series of pencil works on paper, in which “heaps”, numbers and QR codes are drawn in graphite with meticulous precision. These are drawings that confirm and reiterate the importance of manual work. As for the third group of drawings that are part of the exhibition, “initially no one knows at all that it exists…” writes Janka Vukmir.
The exhibition proposal, by Jandrić, in fact, presented at the ICA in Zagreb last April, requires the public to interact and scan the QR codes that lead to this third series of works hidden in the digital world that thus reveal themselves beyond the two-dimensional plane of the drawing.

“But what exactly are these heaps by Jandrić? – continues the curator – His professional biography states that he studied architecture, abandoning it in favor of studying sculpture, but never once in his work did he abandon the basic principles of spatial thinking. He is interested in numbers, drawing, geometry, space, volume, concept, analysis and context, basically the basis for planning. When he introduced the idea of ​​a heap into his work, thirty years ago, it was actually a reflection of the attitude that a heap of any material is a potential sculpture and that a sculpture can be made of any material and medium because, in addition to three-dimensionality, it also achieves its volume not simply through the materiality of the form but also through the accumulation of imagined content. For Jandrić, almost everything is a heap and every heap is a sculpture. Everything is a sculpture, he said in a conversation during the preparations for his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. These heap drawings should also be understood in this way, as deconstructed sculptures, divided into sequences of two-dimensional drawings, planes.”

Jandrić therefore invites the public to reconsider the concept of “heap” that in the artist’s work transcends its purely material dimension and becomes a symbol of a continuous process of accumulation and transformation, both material and conceptual. These heaps, Vukmir tells us, take on the symbolic form of a triangle and a circle inscribed in a square in the drawings, shapes that constitute an almost Euclidean principle of the analysis of structure, space and changes.

In the codified act of opening the digital space where the third group of works resides, new relationships are added and this further accumulation raises questions about the role of the observer’s participation and the evolution of the perception of art in the hybrid contemporary visual context.

The exhibition can be visited until 8 April 2025 (Studio Tommaseo, via del Monte 2/1; opening hours Tue-Fri from 5 pm to 8 pm, free admission).

Đorđe Jandrić (Zadar, 1956) studied architecture at the University of Zagreb in 1975, but interrupted his studies in 1978 to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts and studied art history at the Faculty of Philosophy. He graduated in 1985 (J. Biffel, J. Poljan). He began exhibiting at the 13th Zagreb Youth Salon in 1981. Between 1992 and 1994 he was the art director of the magazine «Kinoteka». In 2005 he represented Croatia at the Statue and Object exhibition in Bratislava and in 2008 at the Europart exhibition in Geneva. From 2007 to 2022 he taught at the Academy of Applied Arts at the University of Rijeka. He lives and works in Zagreb and to date has held over thirty solo exhibitions and participated in about eighty group exhibitions in the country and abroad. In her permanent research on the concept of sculpture, she expresses herself in almost all visual media (sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, video, film).