On Wednesday, 15 April at 8:00 PM, the Studio‑21 Gallery will host the opening of the exhibition Clausa by
Edvin Dragičević, Full Professor of Art.

The exhibition will be opened by Maja Zemunik, Associate Professor of Art.
Curator: Ana Petković Basletić.

The exhibition will remain open until 5 May 2026.
We look forward to welcoming you!

Clausa

The artistic practice of Edvin Dragičević is distinguished by a high level of technical excellence, an authentic artistic signature, and topical themes that encourage reflection on the reality we inhabit. His work is also imbued with a pervasive sense of irony and humor, which in his artistic concepts is sometimes direct and explicit, but more often concealed and subtle.

The exhibited woodcuts from the graphic portfolio CLAUSA, created in 2023 during the third graphic session of the Gorski Kotar Sculpture Workshop, together with a new series of large-format works of the same title executed in silkscreen technique, form a complementary whole within a unified artistic concept. This concept is thematically coherent with the artist’s earlier graphic cycles, such as Illusion of Safety or Subterraneus, in which he examines the issues of security and shelter in uncertain times from various perspectives.

Upon receiving an invitation to participate in the graphic session of the Gorski Kotar Sculpture Workshop in Lokve, Edvin Dragičević accepted the challenge of working in the woodcut technique, which forms the conceptual basis of the workshop but is atypical for his usual graphic practice. Rather than seeking a simpler compromise solution, the artist fully embraced this stimulating task. Stepping outside the familiar territory of etching, a technique in which he is a master, he created a new series of graphic works exclusively using woodcut.

However, the desired visual articulation required a different methodology in the preparation of the matrices than is customary for this medium. In order to achieve clean and uniform monochrome surfaces reminiscent of intaglio printing techniques, it was necessary to neutralize the textural characteristics of the wooden matrix. Since eliminating the grain and inherent features of wood was not possible on all wooden surfaces, a series of tests had to be conducted prior to the final preparation of the printing plates. This process aimed to identify a suitable matrix—one soft enough to allow the intended execution, yet sufficiently firm to withstand the printing of an edition without bending.

Beyond the wooden matrix as an immediate associative link to the Gorski Kotar region, the topographic context in Edvin’s Gorski Kotar graphic portfolio is also reflected in the initial inspirational impulse that ultimately shaped the thematic focus of the portfolio. A preserved local bunker from the period of the Second World War prompted the artist to return to a subject that had fascinated him for many years—one that he had previously explored in the extensive small-format graphic series Illusion of Safety, inspired by Paul Virilio’s book on military defensive architecture, Bunker Archaeology.

Starting from an actual local example of defensive architecture, Edvin expands the visual repertoire of the portfolio by incorporating selected individual examples from his own bunker archive, compiled for the aforementioned series. New interpretations of this specific architectural motif—marked by opposing allusions to danger, destruction, and war on the one hand, and impenetrability, protection, and safety on the other—build upon earlier conceptual premises, yet within an expanded connotative framework. Typological variations of bunkers, stripped of superfluous architectural elements, lose their fundamental characteristics of volume and solidity in the portfolio’s representations. They are reduced to elementary, abstracted, two-dimensional monochrome monoliths reminiscent of abstract geometrism, whose forms often evoke silhouettes of anonymous contemporary residential architecture. The cold, contrasting aesthetic of the white void of the paper and the flatness of the isolated black geometric form deprive the original architectural motif not only of its spatial and temporal connotations, but also of its recognizability and its inherent indestructibility.

Based on an Argandian premise of the equivalence of architecture and culture (civilization)—according to which the bunker serves as a physical reminder of events that marked the twentieth century and as a warning of potential dangers in the twenty-first—the artist, through contradictory and ambiguous visual play, uses the bunker–home analogy to question the possibility of safety within the context of our present, marked by incomprehensible events that defy reason. Confronted with various crises (migration crises, nuclear threats, and others) caused by greed, egocentrism, and existential fears, individuals seek new refuges—places of isolation and shelter. Through a dual correlation of motifs and the negation of impressions of impenetrability and protection, a pervasive sense of unease and danger is intensified, as well as the emptiness of the illusion of preservation. The bunker (home) is transformed into a timeless, unreal, and universal symbol of dehumanization, isolation, and loss, in which there is no shelter—only alienated and lonely individuals.

Remaining within the same thematic and conceptual domain, and prompted by further reflection on the home–bunker motif, Edvin Dragičević continues to develop and expand the visual solutions from the smaller-format woodcuts (300 × 425 mm) in his recent series of large-format works. These new visual realizations present transfers of selected monolithic monochrome forms from woodcuts into monumental silkscreens. By changing the scale of representation of the black planar silhouettes of defensive architecture—stripped of volume and solidity and evoking contemporary villas—the artist further amplifies the futility of the grandiosity of elite home-bunkers and the discomfort of false impenetrability. In a society devoid of empathy and humanity, any sense of safety is rendered a mere illusion.

The exhibited graphic sheets, with their unconventional imagery, conceal beneath an appealing simplicity a subtle provocation, as well as an ironic articulation of the distorted perspective of our civilization and the absurdity of our time—an era defined by defeat and powerlessness.

Ana Petković Basletić

The exhibition is co-financed by the European Union through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NextGenerationEU), as part of the institutional research project KUZ: Contact – Art in the Community, IP‑UNIST‑56, of the Arts Academy in Split.

The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.