P.S. FAMOUS CRO 2018 N.K. KURTOVIC

Nives Kavurić-Kurtović is one of the greatest names of modern Croatian arts. She was born in Zagreb in 1938. Her father, Zvonimir Kavurić, was a prominent architect who cooperated with Le Corbusier. She spent her entire life in the house her father built, in Cvjetno naselje. He was an idealist of human rights and social justice. He and his brother were both executed by the Ustashe regime. Ulica braće Kavurića (Kavurić Brothers Street) was named after them and then renamed to something else. Nives Kavurić-Kurtović kept a distance from everything public and never referred to those facts. She received her degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1962 under the guidance of Professor Fran Baće. For the next five years she cooperated with the Master Classes of Krsto Hegedušić. Until 1983 she lived as a freelance artist and then became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1997 she became a regular member of the CASA. She passed away in Zagreb in 2016. She was incomparable to others as she dodged all group definitions. Her most real space was mental space that she painted and wrote about ruthlessly printing out her life. This is how she realised an opus that is an autobiography in each sense of the word. She was her own source and her own comment. She had the ability to see shapes “prior to the creation of the world“, hesitation of their creation, their escape from completeness, their endless metamorphosis. Surrealism was sometimes brought up when her paintings were being mentioned. However, everything she painted or wrote about – because the media of pictures and words were mutual and inseparable, so the lines often unravelled into a letter (of authentic literal value) – it was very “credible“. Except she marked the invisible world of the interior, floating, levitating world of some fertile water that crystallised from a picture to a word and vice versa. Colours, never raw, mixed with white, followed the temperature of the spirit and the line, from gentle swaying to dramatic sharpness, was the painter's cardiogram. Human and animal figures, their pre-formations and deformations, filled the weightless sphere, space without dimensions. In her last ink drawings, dense blackness weaving dominated replacing/muting all colours. In huge painted scrolls, tens of meters long, “rolls of life“, Nives' time unravelled. All her characters tested the distances between beings, instability of emotions, distortion of certainty. Insights and shapes that cannot be repeated, unique hand – interior world coordination, freedom of association, organic dialogue of two media, almost magical mediation of a child's joy, permanent wonder and clear bitterness secure Nives Kavurić-Kurtović a high and permanent place in the history of Croatian art, in the memory of a nation and in the definition of a more noble world. Željka Čorak, Ph.D., Scientific Advisor – Emeritus at the Institute of Art History