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GORAN TRBULJAK. Before and After Retrospective

GORAN TRBULJAK. Before and After Retrospective
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Goran Trbuljak. Before and After Retrospective

The present publication provides an intricate survey of the work of Goran Trbuljak, an artist whose sharp-minded, self-reflective, and ironic gestures undermine the mythology surrounding the notion of the artist and ingeniously question power relations in the art world. Trbuljak has been examining the issues of authorship, anonymity, and originality since his early works from the late 1960s. Active in Zagreb, in his native, he developed his work in parallel with kindred international art currents. Known as the New Art Practice, the generation of Yugoslav artists to which Trbuljak himself belonged, explored means of overcoming the modernist tradition. In comparison to many of his contemporaries in Zagreb and around the world, whose conceptual art practices continued in the spirit of late modernism by exalting the artist and the aura of the artwork, Trbuljak’s strategy was, nevertheless, notably distinctive. With his modest, self-effacing, unpretentious, and intimate works he exposed the inner conflict he experienced as an artist and embraced the paradox of art’s self-negating tactics by persistently exploring and probing the margins between art and anti-art, the artist and the non-artist.
The dialectical principle of Trbuljak’s work can also be considered as a key for reading this book. With a compelling range of contributions by Ivana Bago, Andrea Bellini, Christian Rattemeyer, Jerko Denegri and Vít Havránek, that examine Trbuljak’s artistic position from a variety of perspectives, the present publication aims to show the development of Trbuljak’s reconsideration of the status of the artwork and the role of the artist.

Year: 2018

Editor: Tevž Logar assisted by Gaja Golija

Publisher: gurgur editions

Distributed by: Skira

Texts by: Ivana Bago, Andrea Bellini, Jerko Denegri, Christian Rattemeyer

Language: English

Pages: 330

ISBN: 978-961-91531-9-2