MESTART: Ana Kuzmanic_Eng

The creativity of Ivan Meštrović can not be experienced without the prism of personal experience: his, but also of the person who interacts with him. Different experiences of the artist are materialized in the works and the power of their expression reaches the observer irrespective of his knowledge of certain life, social and other circumstances that caused them. One of the most prominent and most common experiences reflected in all of Meštrović’s phases is the experience of motherhood, the relationship between mother and child – whether he is contemplating it through the image of his own mother, the mother of his children or the Mother of God.

Ana Kuzmanić, by vocation academic painter, by interest author of a wide range of media, recognized a universal and deeply personal closeness to this aspect of the sculptor’s work through direct experience of herself as a new mother. Intrigued by Meštrović’s projections of motherhood, she decided to awaken the concatenation of these experiences, which are both eternal and the same, but at the same time ephemeral, unrepeatable. She depicted her own moments on that trace, emphasizing it with the aspect of immateriality. Her dialogue with the artist of a different generation, media and gender is realized in the diametrical contrast of her videos, light and sound works, and women’s experience and its solid matter, figurative form and male position.

Ivan Meštrović transformed the real women in his surroundings into Madonnas, mythical beings and extensive concepts like the notion of homeland or history. Ana Kuzmanić enters into a dialogue with the contours of religious, ideological, gender and other constructions of motherhood reflected in Meštrović’s work and puts them in the context of modernity. (From the foreword by Barbara Vujanović)

Ana Kuzmanić was born in 1980 in Split. In 1999 she enrolled in Restoration and Preservation of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. In 2001 she enrolled in Painting at the same Academy. In 2006 she graduated under the mentorship of prof. Igor Rončević.  In 2007 she enrolled in postgraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh College of Art.  Since 2011, he has acted as co-founder and member of the Eastern Surf international group. Since 2009 she has been employed as an assistant at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy, University of Split.