17 – 31 July 2018
Croatian Association of Interdisciplinary Artists

CURATORS: Marko Golub, Dejan Kršić

An overview of the designer work by Dalibor Martinis from 1974 to the late 1980s follows a range of recent exhibitions dealing with the relationship of design and neo-avantgarde art with specific focus on conceptual art, the new art practice of 1970s, on two different levels. The first level concerns the issue of historiography of Croatian design, where the names of authors whose work is primarily linked to visual art are often elusive. This is partly an issue of the discontinuity in the work of designers, but it is probably partly the fact that the generation who came into its own in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contrary to their generational predecessors, great artists and designers like Ivan Picelj, did not rely on the concept of ‘synthesis’, or the functional integration of disciplines. That they couldn’t really have done it is shown by the other level, concerning the world view of the said generation, which is mostly called “new artistic practices” in Croatia, and which explicitly brings into question the traditional notion of art, artist and artwork, leaving the supposedly neutral, but ideologically deeply marked gallery spaces and replacing them with the street, the public space, the media space, with the everyday. Another aspect in which Martinis’s undertaking in the area of design is characteristic of the time period is the complete focus to working for customers in culture – Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Workers’ and People’s University of Moša Pijade, Jadran film, etc.