Ivan Kožarić. Torso. Bronze.

Description

Kožarić, Ivan, Croatian sculptor (Petrinja, 10. VI. 1921 – Zagreb, 15. XI. 2020). Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1949. From the beginning of his artistic activity, he showed a strong tendency towards sudden changes in sculptural expression. The sculpture Osjećaj cjeline (1953–54) already marked a strong departure from the tradition of figurative sculptural expression, while the Tree cycle (1956) was a sign of increased expressiveness, achieved by reducing forms. The first sculptures, most often portraits, which radiate refined humor (Mladić s kryest, 1956), and a large number of reliefs (The City, Cartographers, Snippet of the River) are from this period, close to conceptual archetypes. The constant departure from traditional trends and the aspiration to develop a new artistic sensibility bring him closer to the Gorgona group (active in Zagreb 1959–66). By reducing the means of expression in the cycle Forms of Space (1961–69), he achieved extremely refined, abstract-symbolic forms, and then again approached contemporary avant-garde movements in art (Prizemjleno sunce, 1971). He experimented with small-sized sculptures, he painted everything in his studio with gold paint, he discovered the principle of redesign and recycling (the Spontaneous Sculpture cycle), but he returned to the problems of his earlier works, which he places in a different spatial context (the sculpture by AG Matoš on Strossmayer's Promenade in Zagreb, 1978). The series Reliefs (1979–80) showed a certain calming down and turning towards the aestheticization of forms. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, he made sculptures from roughly hewn wood with metal applications, and then imaginative and crazy installations. He has been a regular member of HAZU since 1997. He received the "Vladimir Nazor" Lifetime Achievement Award (1997).