CROATIAN VISUAL ART - RADOVANI

Kosta Angeli Radovani, Dunja I, 1957, Modern Gallery, Zagreb It would be exaggerated to assign a separate position of sculptures by Kosta Angeli Radovani in the modern period of Croatian art only to his exceptional formative conditions: born in 1916 in London and educated at the Milan’s Brera from1934 to 1938 in the class of Francesco Messina. However, very good knowledge of entire European tradition and early encounters with avant-garde and modernist flows enabled him to acquire an exceptional self-awareness and freedom of morphologic moving through diverse challenges and temptations of radical art movements, safeguarding the basis features of his chosen discipline, the clarity of sculptural expression, focus on mass and volume, subtle treatment of surface and sustained dynamism of basic shapes. After returning to his homeland, Radovani attends from 1941 to 1945 a special workshop with Fran Kršinić at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and immediately after the termination of the Second World War undertakes to prove his abilities in creating unconventional monuments. Anyhow, his plastic sensitivity and refined culture were a real contrast to then much in demand socrealistic rhetoric and he was just polemically remote from the exaggerated pathetic of Meštrović's example, which was necessarily followed by some other sculptors. Modern by his pureness and reduced modulation, contemporary by his direct reacting and vital orientation, Kosta Angeli Radovani in the 50-ies of the last century greatly contributed to the idea of freedom of creation and to the destruction of mere mimetic understanding of sculptor's tasks, although he never renounced anthropomorphism - in his own way conceived „figuration“. Very insightful and focused as portraitist, Radovani variated a theme of female nude as his most frequent motif. The sculpture Dunja I (1957) is an important stage on his way from the summary vision of the selected corpus toward the increased geometrisation and structural indentedness of stylised elements. Determined to use a firm and massive model, he achieved a playful form by vivid movement of limbs and by “activating” the space which a figure takes and encompasses by its positions. He died on 2 February 2002 in Zagreb.


Tonko Maroević