Maja S. Franković / Reminiscences
Graphic gesture – from an experiment in plane to a graphic book –object

The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
The Department of Prints and Drawings
15 May–15 June 2012

Maja Franković, after having received eleven domestic and three international awards, among them two from the Department of Prints and Drawings, won in 2009, at the 5th Croatian Prints Triennial, the Award of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts – the highest acknowledgement for achievements in the field of the contemporary printmaking art. This award is not only the proof of the continuity in her work, but also the confirmation of her status as an exquisite artistic and metier printmaker personality, as well as her essential involvement and accomplishment regarding the particularly fine and demanding planographic and intaglio techniques.

Maja Franković is the key personality and the vital vertical of the Printmaking School of Rijeka. Alongside her many personal artistic activities, she also takes active part in educating the young generations of artists. Aware of the fact that the traditional technique of lithography, long and harshly neglected, deserved revitalisation and flourishing, she initiated summer seminars in lithography at her studio in Brseč, thereby widely opening her doors to students hungry for new knowledge and experience. This move has made Maja Franković a prominent promoter of the fine printmaking techniques, who even today manage to realise any contemporary artistic idea or the most modern project. Lithography, which had after the closing of lithographic studios by Murtić, Reiser and Prica been entirely forgotten, was rescued from oblivion by Maja Franković and brought back to the printmaking art.

Today, her name is a synonym for the freedom of an artistic approach marked by distinctive imagination, an intriguing and imaginative language of a picture made alive in space, rich in marvellous vitality, bold openness and spontaneous gesture. By using coloured lithography and intaglio, the term of two-dimensional in prints becomes a spatial game, which negates the paradigm of a wall as a standard place for exhibiting graphic sheets.

While she expresses and shows the values and special features of her talent as painter by using extensive brush-strokes and an abundance of coloured lithography, her talent for drawing and an explorer’s nerve by an etcher’s expressiveness and fine scaling of black on both large and small sheets of paper, Maja Franković has been continually fulfilling her sculptor’s longings by composable, well-indented, collaged and perforated graphic objects, which have recently become the trademark of her art.

Slavica Marković