Dubravka Lošić:

Postmodern Assemblages of Parallel Worlds

« The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. »

– Francis Bacon

Introduction:

Dubravka Lošić is a Croatian contemporary artist born in 1964 in Dubrovnik, southern Croatia. She grew up in Montovjerna, a mountainous, at the time remote neighborhood in Dubrovnik, close to her family knitwear workshop, where she acquired her first experiences with fabrics and knitting. After finishing the School of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Dubravka Lošić pursued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she graduated in the class of Professor Ferdinand Kulmer, a Croatian abstract painter, and the laureate of the Vladimir Nazor Award for lifetime achievement in visual arts. She will mention Kulmer as a mentor of crucial meaning, who encouraged her to create and expose outside the established academic norms. In parallel, she studied art history at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She returned to Dubrovnik in 1990, where she continued to create in the midst of the raging war in Croatia.

Dubravka Lošić is the first Croatian artist to have held a solo exhibition in France since Croatia’s independence, in the Saint Barbe caste in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a municipality near Paris, in 1992. In February of the same year works were exhibited at the 43th Salon of young painters in the famous historic site, exhibition hall and museum complex, Grand Palais, in Paris. As an idependent artist, she e also works in set and costume design. Her long-lasting career with over 50 solo and more than 100 group exhibitions, was crowned by the publishing of her Monograph, in 2022, written by the art historian Margarita Sveštarov Šimat and Dubravka Lošić, who is also the editor of the edition, and published with the support of the City of Dubrovnik and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

« Everything can be used, everything can be an art tool. Everything has its own value and possibility. Sometimes just a thread found in a certain piece can give birth to a new idea. »

Assemblages, recycling, conceiving space as an entity on its own, and artistic series as permanent works in progress – those would be probably the terms I would use to summarize the singular artistic expression of Dubravka Lošić. Sensible to the endless creative potential of fabrics, as part of her family heritage, and adapting the assemblage method from the repertoire of historical avant-gardes, D. Lošić created her first cycle with large-scale formats between 1985 and 1987, entitled Summer Afternoon in 5 Days (from Croatian: Ljetno Popodne u 5 Dana). These large pictures-collages, made by folding, creasing and assembling fabrics, transparent paper, and thread ribbons can be felt as bodiless figures, but also as thorn fragments of a complex, intimate perception of space.

Space holds a major place in the artistic creation of D. Lošić. Aware of their potential to create new relations with the art piece, Lošić opted for abandonned factories as workspaces of her exhibitions. In 2023, she held her exhibition U tranziciji/Depo, in the former factory of textile products Trikop d.o.o. in Blato on the island of Korčula. Her first factory workspace was the abandoned factory hall of the former oil mill Radeljević. Another singular location, selected for the purpose of the film dedicated to her series of works « Lapad » was the the popular hotel Grand Hotel, the abandoned and ruined hotel complex of the former jewel of Croatian tourism in Kupari. Although born and raised in one of the world’s loveliest walled cities, the so-called « Pearl of Adriatic » D. Lošić always considered it inappropriate to directly invade the space of the city using it as an artistic motif. In retrospect, she admits that probably the specific light of the city had a certain impact on her series.

The Kalamota series, named after one of the several Elaphiti islands, have a stamp of Mediterranean depth and blueness. « This series has been inspired by one ship, one departure, and my reflections on how to project the sensations that came along on canvas », explains Lošić. From resin, canvas, wool, rope, rubber, to iron and plastic mesh, everything can be used as an artistic medium, and the artist’s interest lies in questioning the relationships between materials, in trying to assemble the incompatible.

« I love to explore relationships between colors, for example between reds and blues. I like to try to combine something incompatible, also when it comes to materials, like the relationship between pencil and metal, and finding a solution on how to make it last. »

The series « Women’s room is an interesting result of an accidental finding- it all started, as D. Lošić explains, with a small abandoned photo of a tapestry. Composed of acrylics, canvas, resin, and metal, with these series Lošić, in her typical subtle, discrete way, questions the dynamics of male and female relations.

What is specific to the artistic expression of D. Lošić is the fact that her art series remain fragmented, she always returns back to them, always open to the idea of renewal and adding something new, which is particularly visible in Rosarium, or « roses », a series of works started in the 80s, and the Runners. Her works leave the viewer enveloped in the mystery of the unspoken, but sensed. The question about the message behind the art pieces popped-up almost immediately during our interview: « Each of my pieces carry a message, but it is more of a silent, cocooned message », says Lošić.

Speaking of the idea beside each peace, the artist refers to her TONDO series with the following:« Whilst working on the TONDO series, I can realize now that the screaming red color, the persian red, and the cut wool from each side of TONDO, coincided with the period of the Iranian protests in 2022, when women were cutting-off their hair. Something of that grief, anger and protest was for sure woven in this series. »

In Tondo, the original name for paintings completed on a circle panel or canvas, we can find reminiscences of ancient and renaissance art, as it was a form used by artists such as Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Raphael. However, in contemporary art, the form is mostly used as an expression of continuity, harmony, unity, and completeness, like in the art of Damien Hirst or James Turell. In the case of D. Lošić, Tondo can be perceived as a returning cycle of a perpetual movement, as well as a circular boundary to redefine space. In the words of the artist, as « a path towards the globe », a form that she has been returning and coming back to since a long time.

We can argue that Tondo, as well as the other large-scale textile installations can be considered as images and sculptures in themselves. In this sense, the art of D. Lošić reminds us of the extraordinary three-dimensional tapestries of Jagoda Buić, an avant-garde Croatian visual artist internationally recognized for her significant contributions to the New Tapestry movement in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. It was precisely Buić’s « Structure noire« , that I came to my memory while contemplating Lošić’s « Rains Paris » series from 2018, an installation of twenty upright assemblages, with a a swelling substance of wool that tries to break through the fabric.

It is in Rains Paris that the narrative power of the material comes to its realization. The installation is made of wool yarns, metals and wood that originated from her family’s former knitwear shop. The dripping wool is a liquid mass of melancholy and everything negative that slowly gets released. It is as the more we observe the installation, the more we become connected to our hidden interior conflicts. There is almost an effect of catharsis and purification, and an overwhelming sense of peace, due to the sobriety of monochromatic tones. Strangely enough, the title of the installation has nothing to do with the city of Paris, as the artist explains: « I remember painting in my studio in Dubrovnik on a rainy day. I absolutely adore rain. My friend who came over said that the ambiance reminded her of Paris, so the name was born ». Like a « palindrome », the installation-painting can be read in multiple orientations, which can be observed in the Runners, a cycle of 30 large formats in the combined assemblage technique, created in the period from 2007 to 2010, representing a « big picture of a disturbed world », by the words of the Croatian art historian Margarita Sveštarov Šimat.

« The idea for the Runners goes way back to the 1987 Summer Universiade, that took place in Zagreb. The idea for the year that was imposed to us at the Academy was to create on the theme of man and sport. I remember being frustrated and complaining about it. At that time, I was simultaneously studying the history of art, so I used the Greek runners as a variation on the theme », explains the artist. The image of the Runners resonates in today’s world as a representation of chaos, nightmare, exodus and escape, where individual existences get lost inside of a collective grind of survival. It is important to add that portraits have always been present in the artistic opuscule of Dubravka Lošić. She approaches them with great delicacy and protectiveness, as she explains in her own words: « My portraits are not new, they have first been exposed in Split. They initially represented members of my family, my nephews, and I always considered them to fragile to be exposed to the public. Later on, I have created different variations of their portraits ».

It is impossible to speak about the opuscule of D. Lošić without giving a particular attention to her roses, a motif used since the beginning of her artistic career,present through different cycles, and a emissary of different messages; « I think that with roses, it all started, when I go back in my memory, with some old, blown roses. I even think that it was a terrifying image of a candle in that shape, when I was about 14 or 15 years old, an image so frightening that persecuted me for years. At the beginning the rose was more a provocation of something quite ugly, unavailable to us, like a symbol of opulent celebrations and manifestations that we watched on the Eastern bloc. But that initial impression evolved in time, up to this day where rose is beginning a means of resolving some artistic problems. »

« A rose as a rose can be anything, a symbol of everything. In that war time they were very important to me, as mediums of meditation, of something subconscious, like a rosary… I glued and rolled paper roses as if in a trance, it calmed me down. »

Roses as symbols of prayer for peace, have labeled the famous war cycles « Lullaby, dominated by ambiguity and irony, and also referred to as « conserved war traumas » by some critics. Lošić explains: « While we were under siege, we received a war donation in humanitarian aid, chocolate that was completely inedible. It was humiliating, when we really had nothing, not even basic necessities. Then I used those chocolate envelopes in my rebellion and that’s how a new cycle started. I put them in light pink and light blue roses, I used them the most, which was not really my palette. It seems to me that in this way I invoked a peaceful sleep and a peaceful sky. Later, I expanded that cycle, but always in a similar context. Maybe it was the desire to sleep through the anxiety and absurdity that is happening in front of an indifferent world. A rose as a rose can be anything, a symbol of everything. In that war time they were very important to me, as mediums of meditation, of something subconscious, like a rosary… I glued and rolled paper roses as if in a trance, it calmed me down. »

The Rosary series, as a continuum of Lullaby, is a series in progression since the 80s, a metaphor of ritual self-examination, meditation and penance. The ambiental exhibition Saint Stjepan’s Rosary from June this year (2024) consists of newly produced works performed for the Labin Chapel of St. Stjepan. he author’s concept of Dubravka Lošić and curator Branko Franceschi is based on completely covering the walls of the chapel with thousands of hand-made rosaries, Strongly ingrained in christianity as symbols of paradise reflecting the God’s design, Lošić managed to re-create an intimistic Garden of Eden in the spaces of the 17th century old chapel, enhancing the spiritual message of gratitude and peace with the pink color palette.

This article has just touched the surface of the colossal art creation of D. Lošić over the years, free of any type of social and geographic barriers. Brave and determined in her wish to create only for the sake of art, she reveals to us a parallel world of the beautiful and ugly, of hope and melancholy, of prayers and rage. In her world the voice is given to fabrics, to perishable and discarded materials that release the unspoken, the buried beneath the surface, like the formless chimera of the melancholy that escapes through the dark matter of the tattered wool.

More about the artist:

https://dubravkalosic.com

Instagram: @dubravka_losic

Dubravka Lošić:

Postmodern Assemblages of Parallel Worlds

« Everything can be used, everything can be an art tool. Everything has its own value and possibility. Sometimes just a thread found in a certain piece can give birth to a new idea. »

« I love to explore relationships between colors, for example between reds and blues. I like to try to combine something incompatible, also when it comes to materials, like the relationship between pencil and metal, and finding a solution on how to make it last. »

« A rose as a rose can be anything, a symbol of everything. In that war time they were very important to me, as mediums of meditation, of something subconscious, like a rosary… I glued and rolled paper roses as if in a trance, it calmed me down. »

Laisser un commentaireAnnuler la réponse.

Partager :