An Artistic Opus in Permanent Transition

Insights into the nature of the artistic mission of academic painter Ivan Kožarić, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth

Abstract

There are numerous dimensions in the magnificent opus of academic painter Ivan Kožarić, and there is enormously complex potential of his visual speech in the full breadth of its representational, media, and narrative manifestations. It is not easy to gain insight into his vitality, his artistic temperament (ludic, non-dogmatic, vitalistic, humorous, with a free-minded and almost anarchist irreconcilability), the multiplicity of his works, his free spiritedness, subversiveness, innovation, visual curiosity, imaginative potential, plastic imagination, defiant behaviour, optimism, and the meaning of Kožarić’s striking oeuvre, his high visual culture and plastic articulation, various formal practices and all linguistic formations and polarities in which he experimented over the decades, an incredibly diverse repertoire of subjects, motifs, and messages, his questioning the state and fate of the language of art...