Antun Babić / Selection from the Donation
The Department of Prints and Drawings
The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
7th May – 3rd June

Open
Workdays: 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturdays: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Closed
Sundays and holidays

Towards the end of 2013, Antun Babić donated to the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts three hundred and fifty works from his rich opus of drawings and prints. In this exhibition, having chosen the best among the prints and drawings from the donation, together with sculptures from the artist’s studio, we have presented a cross-section of the artistic accomplishments of this true master of sculpture, print and drawing. Being a firm eastern pillar of Croatian art scene, Antun Babić (born 1931) has for sixty years been continually sending artistic messages from his studio in Vinkovci. A sculptor by vocation, Babić has gathered a thirty-year experience of productive work in the art of print (1957–1987), and produced an excellent opus of sculptures and drawings over a period of six decades. Achromatic expression, the imperative of the line, as well as an obsession with canons of anthropomorphism and the aesthetics of deformity, as adopted artistic paradigms, form the axis of his opus. Babić’s expressivity in presenting surreal and veristic reflections of reality through deformity, grotesque, absurdity and caricaturality is demonstrated in ironic and witty compositions, while absolute dedication to figuration, as the ultimate attribute of visual art, is a constant part of his artistic signature. By abridging motives to an essential formula enclosing both form and content, out of which a deformed, cramped and hypertrophied lonely figure trapped in a (too) tight cadre frame is crystallised, the tragic character of the figure is presented by summary and dynamic formative constructs that are – at the level of content – rich in symbolic and metaphoric reflections. Being an artist with sensible perceptions of existential inventory, he covers a whole range of dramaturgic expressions of misery, fear, wrath, rebellion, spite, resignation, melancholy, lovers’ turbulences, glorification of Life, etc. In his every artistic interpretation of nature and human habits, denuded and fully simplified in performance, yet with grains of humour, the percipient’s usual initial reaction is backing away when confronted with the brutal (sur) reality presented.

Ružica Pepelko