Office for Photography invites you to the opening of the exhibition by the distinguished artist Antun Maračić, that will take place on Monday, June 8 at 7:00 p.m. at Spot Gallery (Čanićeva 6, Zagreb). The exhibition brings together analytical works from the private collection of art historian Evelina Turković, created in the medium of photography between 1976 and 1984. The exhibition curators, Sandra Križić Roban and Evelina Turković, will lead a guided tour of the exhibition at the opening at 7:30 p.m.
During the duration of the exhibition, a photography workshop titled Attempt at Sketch Execution will be held under the guidance of artist Ivan Gundić, along with the presentation of a new issue of the magazine Fototxt (No. 11), dedicated to the artist Antun Maračić and artist books, a moderated discussion, and screenings of Maračić’s short films, which will be preceded by an introductory talk by film critic Petra Belc. The listed events will be accompanied by a sale of printed editions published by the Office for Photography at promotional prices.
Antun Maračić, Untitled, 1976–1979
Antun Maračić had a gift for noticing details in his immediate surroundings – details that may not have seemed destined for the camera, but which, precisely through photography, were transferred into an artistic context. The works he created in this medium should be considered within the framework of so-called new, analytical photography, which is focused on the cognitive, conceptual, and linguistic nature of art. In Maračić’s case, analytical photographic procedures should also be viewed in relation to his work in primary painting, having turned his attention early on to process and to the various connections he symbolically established with his point of departure. Through photography, he proved, as he once said, that he was alive, while the camera in his hand (or in the hands of those to whom he entrusted the act of pressing the shutter) was primarily a tool that allowed him to emphasize the process itself: the process of photographing, thinking, behaving; of making decisions.
In the exhibition Antun Maračić: Gaze – Process – Time, we focused on his analytical photographic works, and one film, created between 1976 and 1984. The notes he left alongside many of the works help us understand them better. He wrote them in his energetic hand or typed on a typewriter, pasted onto the backs of photographs or added in their margins. The photographs are part of his processual works in which he combined images with textual statements, sometimes working on them over several decades. We often encounter existentially inflected thoughts that the artist aligned with the depiction of “bare time”, as he once called it in conversation: time spent on gradual, often barely perceptible shifts documented in the photographs, through which he showed the physical movements of his own – or another’s – body in time, or other changes he encountered – trajectories of light, differences in tonality, the reflection of an interior in the background of an exterior space, but also the time that passed while, for example, he allowed a film negative to undergo the process of bleaching, not creating individual images but ultimately treating the whole film as an object in space – which he also photographed.
On this occasion, let us recall photographic digressions that speak of “work and thought as the basic forms of human behaviour.”[1] In Maračić’s case, of course, this means artistic work and thought woven into the very core of his being (and behaviour). His practice is characterised by processuality, the demystification of the artistic act, seriality, the absence of narrative, and an interest in the position of the individual (whereby the individual in question may be unknown to him, their existence conveyed through someone else’s photograph – something he would make particular use of in his later series, touched by distinctive images that were “appropriated”, and by contents and frames that had “vanished” and been “emptied”, produced outside the period under consideration).
Already in his early, predominantly painterly works created after his studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (Layered Paintings), Maračić explored and emphasized the material structure of the work and the passage of time invested in its making. And as we now sift through works that are modest in terms of production yet significant in value, created over a period of slightly less than a decade, we encounter sensitive and witty, sometimes (self-)ironic comments on his own artistic position, as well as on the criteria and demands that society places before artists. Each phase he photographed – or for which, instead of making an image, he “reached” for words – is a fragment of the time of space and the time of form, measured against the time of his own life.
Sandra Križić Roban
Excerpt from the text to be published in the magazine Fototxt no. 11
[1] Dimitrije Bašičević, “Konzekvencije fotografije. 11. Digresija o kulturi i umjetnosti sedamdesetih godina.” Inovacije u hrvatskoj umjetnosti sedamdesetih godina, Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art (Museum of Contemporary Art), 1982, 83.
Antun Maračić, from the photograšhic series “Drunken Vlaška”, 1979.
Antun Maračić (1950–2023) was a visual artist, art critic, curator, and director of several Zagreb galleries (Extended Media Gallery, Student Centre Gallery, Zvonimir Gallery, and Forum Gallery) and, from 2000 to 2012, director of the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik. He graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Šime Perić (1976), after which he became an associate of the Master Workshop of Ljubo Ivančić and Nikola Reiser. He organised his first exhibition while still a secondary-school student (in 1966, with Željko Subić), at the Centre for Culture and Education in Nova Gradiška, and began exhibiting intensively from 1976 onwards. That same year, together with Željko Kipke, he published his first artist’s book, The Book of Antun Maračić and Željko Kipke, after which he went on to produce several original books of photographs. From the earliest phase of analytical painting and conceptual photography in the second half of the 1970s through to his final works, Maračić’s artistic practice consistently centred on perception, process, and time as phenomena to be witnessed and documented. He was also preoccupied with the themes of absence and emptiness. For his artistic and critical work, he received Vjesnik’s Josip Račić Award (2004) and the Annual Award of the Croatian Section of AICA (2016).
Related events:
- Guided exhibition tour, 8th June 2026, 7:30 p.m., Spot Gallery
- Photography workshop Attempt at Sketch Execution, 18th June, 5 p.m., Spot Gallery
- Presentation of the new issue of Fototxt magazine no. 11, a moderated discussion, and screenings of Antun Maračić’s short films, 26th June, 7:00 p.m., Spot Gallery
