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Nikolina Ivezić - Art Book English and Croatian
The book is also available on Amazon, as paperback edition (print-on-demand). Also on:
With her original, recognizable and engaged work, Nikolina Ivezić (Zagreb, 1970) has been one of the top Croatian artists for a number of years. The versatile artist who works with sculpture, illustration, scenography in theater and film, murals, street art, product and graphic design, video art and conceptual art, action and multimedia, is best known for her paintings-objects, where in a specific way, combining elements of painting, sculpture (relief), illustration and comics, she outlines controversial topics from our everyday life, criticizing consumerism, clichés, modern fetishes, and most of all sexist exploitation of the female body. Her approach is critical and ironic - with a dose of humor, provocatively pointing her finger and mocking stereotypes, mass media, sensationalism and superficiality of the modern society. The book - in English and Croatian - presents three decades of her artistic career. During this time, following the pop-art idiom and comic strip aesthetics, but at the same time building her expression on specific iconography (scenes with comic-style figures without faces and handwritten witty comments), and by using original and characteristic materials and techniques in her work (laminated Styrofoam and other materials painted with acrylic, with applied sheet metal tiles - all this simply named "combined technique"), Nikolina Ivezić always knew how to intrigue both the audience and the critics in the right way; to provoke attention and even reaction, showing each time its topicality and engagement.
Design and Layout: Nikolina Ivezić Texts: Mladen Lučić, Željko Špoljar (aka. Pavle Svirac / Književna Groupie) Editor: Zvonimir Bulaja ISBN: 978-953-328-449-1
Her works, made with inexpensive materials, accentuate the basic characteristics of her artistic expression, which is, along with pop art, also based on Bad Painting, comic strip, pin-up magazines, the aesthetics of advertising, and today's erotica and porn industry. Busty women, pumped-up men, comic-strip heroes, all of them with no faces but only with the outline of a head that rounds the empty surface painted with skin tones, all these are the nameless subjects of Nikolina's works. They are, just like modern society, deprived of their identity and any sort of individuality: entities of impersonal mass incorporated in cheap consumerist kitsch attire; the artist emphasizes this with expressive basic colors and elements such as metal, silver and gold stars. With her simple and innovative artistic language, with the themes of her work, and with her presence in places that communicate with the audience directly, Nikolina became the most important artist that helped create Zagreb's alternative pop culture of the last decade of the previous century and the beginning of the new century. Nikolina's parody relates not only to social context, but it also lucidly questions contemporary art, its role and purpose, as well as the established system of values. She chose a form of expression that anyone can understand, and her art is not laden with hermetic, intellectual premises and sublimated messages. ---- Mladen Lučić
Then I asked her what I could I do to make it up to her, for using her work on the cover of my book. ---- "Pavle Svirac"
More about the artist:
The book has been published with the financial support of the
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