About the Institute

At the Institute of Chemistry, on April 18, 2017, we opened an exhibition of art works by Jure Zadnikar entitled "Kassandra boogie-woogie" (free via Mondrian).The painter Jure Zadnikar presents his last cycle of paintings on paper, in which he partly relies on his early periods, and in substance derives precisely from his works whose references are found in important painting landmarks of European art history. In the new cycle of paintings, Zadnikar moves sovereignly and masterfully between the iconography of Mondrian's modernist paintings, in which (Mondrian) exhibits natural phenomena (especially trees) and breaks them into an atomized world of visual plots and lines, and between iconography behind Zadnikar's beloved Kassandra landscapes, which is blended with bright light with exceptional drawing and Mediterranean color scheme.What is probably even more intriguing is precisely this relationship between: 1. Mondrian as a painter conceptually breaking down the motif of tree and nature into a non-figurative, abstract painting with color rectangles and an orthogonal network of color relations, and 2. between the experience of the European painting tradition, in which precisely the Greek, so to speak, ancient landscape shows itself in a new light of this attitude. As if Zadnikar were pushing the "undo" in the historical painterly sense, the modernist revolt against tradition began to recede back into its own frame and into the field of authentic European artistic experience.

Curator: Jiri Kočica