The Missing Master
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- The Missing Master
- 2023
- oil on canvas
- 89 × 116 cm
David Maljković’s artistic practice began with painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and continued at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where he spent time in a circle of artists that included figures such as Luc Thuymans. Maljković is known for a multifaceted practice that references the works of other artists and his own earlier works and exhibitions by way of a collagist approach, considers individual and collective attitudes toward the complexity of time, and also plays with the nature of the gaze. In painting, he continues to address the themes that he has also examined through photography, film, installation art, sculpture, and collage. At the core of his practice lie narrative elements that investigate the semiotics of visual rhetoric. “His Master’s Voice” and “The Missing Master” take up the formalist tendency of annihilating the motif itself and are conceived as pictorial events based on the geometries of the golden ratio. The protagonist of these events is a figure taken from an advertisement commissioned by the firm Albert Breyer, a distributor of gramophones and of records released by the British label His Master’s Voice (founded in 1901 by The Grammophone Co. Ltd.). This 1929 advertisement was designed by the Croatian artist Sergije Glumac. In the painting “The Missing Master,” the role of costumes by Anatol Petrytsky is to create an archetype or model of the master, at the same time giving and taking away meaning. Here, another painter’s voice becomes the vehicle for the painting process itself, with the narrative thus unfolding into layers comprising several artistic and linguistic threads. Da.M., W.S.