After having a dozen group and solo exhibitions around Europe, Vahabovic will have his first solo exhibition in Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU) starting September 15th. Foundations in mud, as the exhibition is called, will present six new paintings that diverge from his former work driven by narrative, focusing more on experimentation with techniques and materials.
The exhibition will be opened until October 4th.
Excerpt from the text by Klaudio Stefancic:
One doesn’t have to be an art expert to notice that Zlatan Vehabovic‘s paintings represent a particular set of motives. Abandoned houses, shelters in the middle of woods, playful children, stranded whales, icebergs, marooned boats, empty tents in the wilderness and faceless human figures are just some of the scenes which appear, almost obsessively, in this artist’s work.
Instead of dealing with the problems posed by painting as a medium, several modern artistic movements and tendencies focused on the potentials of symbolic representation. For example, both surrealism and fin de siècle art rely on realistic methods of display, but they do not do so in order to depict the daily life of citizens of that time – this task had been undertaken by impressionism several decades earlier – but in order to reveal a reality of a higher order, something that lies beyond the scenes we encounter in our everyday life.
