Archived: Zlatko Keser – monographic exhibition

ZLATKO KESER – monographic exhibition

• continuation of the cycle Modern Classics
• 10.09. – 31. 10. 2020.

A large monographic exhibition of the artist, professor and academician Zlatko Keser was opened in the Klovićevi dvori Gallery. The exhibition continues a series of previous exhibitions from the Modern Classics cycle, such as the retrospective exhibitions of Dimitrij Popović and Vasko Lipovac and last year’s large exhibition of painters Mersad Berber. Zlatko Keser was born on January 23, 1942 in Zagreb. In his hometown, he graduated from the School of Applied Arts and the study of painting, as well as postgraduate studies (1969) at the Academy of Fine Arts, in the class of Professor Oton Postružnik. After graduating, he is an associate of the cult Master Workshop of Krsto Hegedušić. For many years he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and for his work in 2014 he was appointed to the honorary title of professor emeritus. Since 2000 he has been a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In his rich biography, Zlatko Keser has recorded numerous solo exhibitions throughout Croatia; special mention should be made of the exhibition in the Art Pavilion in 1990, two exhibitions held in the Cabinet of Graphics in 1999 and 2011, the exhibition in the Adris Gallery in Rovinj in 2011 and the one in the Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2018.

Upon graduation in 1967, he won his first award for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and a series of awards culminated in 2015, when he was awarded the Vladimir Nazor State Lifetime Achievement Award. Although drawing and painting were Keser’s primary media of artistic expression, throughout his long career he was also involved in fresco painting and illustration and designed about 50 commemorative postage stamps for the Croatian Post. His works have been included in the collections of many national museums and galleries, as well as in private collections, one of which is that of the Austrian collector Alfred Brogyányi, from which many of Keser’s works will be presented in this monographic exhibition. The exhibition at the Klovićevi dvori Gallery will finally, after thirty years, bring to light a larger number of large-format oil paintings that have been sporadically exhibited so far and were less accessible to Keser’s audience.

The exhibition will present the painter from his very beginnings, with earlier works from the 1970s, as representatives of the “memory of the beginnings” of his artistic work, which is “based on surrealist heritage, design principles, primarily organic growth, which art language successfully maintains on the border of the figurative and the abstract ”(I. Mance). However, the most represented works will be those from the late 80s to recent works from 2020, in which he is intensively engaged in the research of human, imaginary or real faces, or persons.

Keser’s art is very introverted and intimate: “Far from any exact theme or narrative concept (…) (his art is referentially concerned with experience in the realm of the mental” (I. Mance). For this reason, the works presented can be almost exclusively divided into format and medium, rather than thematically; to large-format paintings (characteristic color clarity), large-format drawings (the Horizon of Melancholy cycle), and smaller drawings arranged in a horror vacui composition, actually in the natural way that Keser himself exhibits them in his studio. The author of the exhibition, Jasmina Bavoljak, presents her own conception of the exhibition as a living being which “rhythmicizes the pictorial materialization of Keser’s subconscious”, in which Keser’s art will be presented in a completely new, hitherto unseen way.

* As the exhibition was postponed for six months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to present to the audience at the last minute something new and interesting from the artist’s oeuvre: the works of Academician Keser created during the isolations. These, new media for him; such as digital drawings and sculptures, which he calls toys, are something never seen before in an academic’s oeuvre.

Author of the professional concept and curator of the exhibition: Jasmina Bavoljak

Authors of texts in the catalog: Jasmina Bavoljak and Ivana Mance

Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 11 am – 7 pm

Ticket price:

• Single ticket: 30 kn
• Discount ticket (students, pupils, pensioners): 20 kn

* In accordance with the current recommendations of the Croatian Institute of Public Health, the number of visitors in the group is limited to a maximum of 13 people, with prior notice to e-mail: prodaja@gkd.hr or phone number 01 4851926 on weekdays from 8 to 15 hours. ..