SPARTAK DULICH

ENDLESS SYSTEMS OF FORMS

- Branko Franceschi, Director-curator Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, Croatia. 2016

THE ART OF SPARTAK DULICH

By Branko Franceschi, Director-curator Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, Croatia. 2016

Historical avant-gardes and especially their successors during the period after World War II, aimed with their radical strategies to eradicate the traditional visual arts disciplines and concept of an art object. Simultaneously, they fostered the active participation of the artists and arts in shaping everyday life and society, and they finally formed the contemporary visual culture and its creative paradigm.

In this constellation once-dominant, the artistic discipline of painting lost its exclusive status of medium, which throughout history most clearly reflected the perception of reality and the world as it was defined by mankind. After a period of oblivion or even the death of painting – as the aspiring theoreticians who believed in the supremacy of technology and methods of then-new media art and practice, in general, proclaimed at the turn of the millennium – the period of its strong revival and particularly of its figurative version followed. However, paintings by the referential painters of the current generation are more inspired by film, TV, or photography regarding the imagery and by the insights of post-conceptual artists in terms of conception and methodology than the legacy of their own art discipline.

This is most evident in their attitude towards the abstract painting, which, after its triumph in the previous century, for the majority of young artists seems to be out of sight and interest.