On Wednesday, September 27, 2023, at 7:00 PM, the exhibition with the precise and cryptic title "MCF / MGK-GVK 2023" was opened at the "Vjekoslav Karas" Gallery in Karlovac. The exhibition's author is the award-winning academic painter Duje Jurić, who is one of the most prominent contemporary Croatian painters of geometric abstraction and has been a presence in the art scene for forty years.
For his first solo presentation to the Karlovac art audience, Duje Jurić has prepared a bewildering light-painting environment consisting of 12 powerful gallery-sized paintings executed with fluorescent acrylic paints on canvas, illuminated by blacklight.
The environment appears surreal and otherworldly, offering new meanings to the fundamental actions of the painter: to paint, to exhibit, to see, while defying the known and expected spatial relationships of the Gallery. Within the ambient arrangement, a chain of enlarged memory chip images captivates with the beauty of geometry, the mastery of the creative process, authentic inner logic and order, and an intriguing enigmatic quality.
These works from this cycle have been exhibited at a major retrospective exhibition titled "Network of Displaced Images" at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the end of 2020, followed by exhibitions in the "Vladimir Bužančić" Gallery in Zagreb in 2022, and at the "Ružić" Gallery in Slavonski Brod earlier this year.
Throughout October, the Gallery will host an educational program alongside the exhibition, which includes expert-guided tours with worksheets and work materials for elementary and high school students. The aim is to provide as many children and youth in Karlovac as possible with a direct encounter with this outstanding artwork.
Interested parties for group school visits to the exhibition are kindly requested to contact us via email at: antonija.druzak@mgk.hr to arrange a visit.
