Mestart Tanja Ravlic_Eng

October 17 – December 31, 2016

The Meštrović Atelier, Zagreb

The MEŠTART programme started in 2009 at the Meštrović Atelier in Zagreb with the aim of updating and re-reading the works of Ivan Meštrović through contemporary art expressions.

We note changes in art and in life by identifying them with phases. They delimit the individual time segments, highlighting the beginning, as the starting point of a new period, and the end, as a kind of summary and conclusion. Just as when we look at a certain piece of art, looking back on our own life, we tend to evaluate and analyse it. Sometimes we can even conserve it, sometimes we tend to expose it to others, or store it in the hidden rooms of inner depots.

Artists often have partially overlapping or completely intertwined life and creative periods, and their experiences materialize in their works. For example, Ivan Meštrović’s Zagreb Period, an exceptionally fertile period of creativity, captured by the postwar situation of the Great War and the spreading of World War II, coincides with certain intimate events such as the artist’s founding of his family with Olga Kesterčanek.

Tanja Ravlić very consciously marks the underscoring lines under one life period with two presentations in Meštrović’s museums. In 2003, when the curator Dalibor Prančević started the practice of exhibiting contemporary artists at the Ivan Meštrović Foundation, today’s Ivan Meštrović Museums, with the project called Ivan Bura – Ivan Meštrović – Tanja Ravlić – Kristina Restović , the artist presented herself with her video Outofflander at the Meštrović Gallery in Split. Thirteen years later, at Meštrović’s Zagreb address, in his studio, Ravlić exhibits videos once again, but visually and semantically complemented by delicately positioned objects, some of which appear in works.

In this exhibition, Tanja Ravlić deals with different aspects of the topic of arrival at the starting point, as well as her attitude towards the areas which formed her. In her works the author only partly, but totally consistently, overlaps with certain Meštrović’s themes. Using free concatenation, she emphasizes the importance of the cyclical renewal of a life and a creative phase. As only some artists and individuals, Meštrović accepted the challenges and risks of turbulent life and historical periods, giving them an indelible stamp with his inexhaustible art. (From the foreword by Barbara Vujanović)

Tanja Ravlić was born in Split in 1977. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1999. She works as an associate professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Split. From 2002 to 2005 she attended postgraduate studies at the Institute of Art in Context of the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin.