Berlin | ArtRegion: Tiergarten

Gregor Podnar

Ivan Kožarić: Sculpture and Drawing

1. Mai – 4. September 2021

Gregor Podnar is pleased to present the second exhibition celebrating the legacy of recently deceased Croatian artist Ivan Kožarić (1921 – 2020). Renowned as a sculptor, since his artistic beginnings and until recent years, Kožarić worked in a variety of media, creating a powerful body of work that spans from permanent and temporary sculptures, installations, and urban interventions, to assemblages, proclamations, photographs, and paintings. With constant variation and transformation of his practice, Kožarić thus created an opus in which curiosity, spontaneous encounters, and change, gave form to often unexpected configurations and compelling works permeated with ambiguity and an exploratory zest.

Inspired by the modernist stylistic framework, however subtly subverting any formalist determinants, his early figurative sculptures point to Ivan Kožarić’s pursuit of a range of different expressive approaches and his search for artistic freedom, which from 1959 to 1966 coincided with his participation in the Zagreb-based Gorgona group. Notably, and as early as the late 1950s, Kožarić was a pioneer of depicting the negative space of shapes with his Inner Eyes (1959) and Shape of Space (Remembering the Flood) (1964) amongst others. Even until his later years, his ongoing investigations continually examined ideas surrounding sculpture in a fascinating and intriguing way that cannot be grasped purely by thought, but can be interpreted in terms of approach. Despite modest international exposure and recognition in comparison to his peers, Julije Knifer, Mangelos (Dimitrije Bašičević), significant achievements of Kožarić’s career were the retrospective exhibition Freedom Is a Rare Bird, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2013) and Documenta 11, Fridericianum, Kassel (2002).