CROATIAN FINE ARTS, Ivan Kožarić

Ivan Kožarić, Grounded Sun, 1971 (gilded bronze, diameter 200 cm) Ivan Kožarić (Petrinja, 1921 - Zagreb, 2020) graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1947 in the class of the professors Frane Kršinić and Vanja Radauš, and in 1949 he completed a special study program under prof. Antun Augustinčić. Although in his early work his main preoccupation was the human figure, he very quickly began to experiment with abstract forms, but refused to define his style as strictly figurative or abstract, the two dominant artistic directions of the time. During his stay in Paris, where he was on a scholarship in 1959, he began to condense his sculptural expression and explore the possibilities of negative volume. Such an approach would culminate during the time of his work in the neo-avant-garde group Gorgona, which he joined in 1960. The radical changes that took place in art during the 1970s stimulated him and would prove a fertile ground for all of his bolder ideas and procedures, the inception of which had already been evident in previous periods. In the early 1970s, he made a series of proposals for interventions in public space, and often abandoned classical sculptural materials. Instead of focusing on his pieces as finished works of art, he was more in favor of open processes. His "discovery" of the golden color proved crucial and led him to transform many of his earlier works, but also ordinary objects from everyday life, with the gesture of gilding, thus transferring them to the poetic plane. He described the golden color as "our everyday sun", and the culmination of this idea was embodied by a sculpture with which he grounded the Sun among passers-by as part of the "Proposal" section of the 6th Zagreb Salon held in 1971. The grounded sun, first made of gilded fiberglass, made its first appearance on a traffic island in front of the Zagreb Croatian National Theater. The installation of a perfect geometric body in the midst of the urban fabric without a plinth and the usual pomp that accompanies the installation of a monumental public sculpture caused a series of unusual, positive and negative, reactions among citizens. The negative reactions culminated in the sculpture being burned in an act of vandalism, which is why it was removed. In 1994, the golden sphere was cast in a durable material – bronze weighing 1,200 kg – and placed in Bogovićeva Street, where its intense coexistence with passers-by continues to this day. Striving for freedom of artistic expression and the expansion of the definition of what a work of art is, Ivan Kožarić created a huge and dynamic oeuvre that left an indelible mark on contemporary Croatian and European art. The Kožarić Atelier, which was exhibited in its entirety for the first time in 1993 at the Zvonimir Gallery, and then in 2002 at documenta 11 in Kassel, was purchased by the City of Zagreb in 2007, thus becoming part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Radmila Iva Janković Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art