Trieste, Studio Tommaseo (Italy)
DISMANTLING STRUCTURES
a solo-show by ŽELJKO KIPKE 
opening on Saturday 22 February, at 18.00 p.m.

Newest paintings by the Croatian artist strike Zagreb icon-buildings which have been strongly characterized by political, economic and cultural history of the city (such as the Parliament, former seat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party).

The opening of Dismantling Structures exhibition will take place on 22 February 2020, at 18 pm, at Studio Tommaseo in Trieste: curator Branko Franceschi will introduce the audience to the artistic world of Croatian artist Željko Kipke and will converse with him.

Kipke uses to paint on canvas typical monochrome backgrounds. This time he distorts on them famous images of Zagreb architecture and depicts buildings like waste papers, crumpled and rolled into a ball, so they are almost unrecognizable. The artist also puts into an experimental animated short film, which contains a Zagreb map pointing those buildings out, his critical questions about the functioning of the institutional system in Croatia, a country that is in transition. 

Dismantling Structures has been realised by Trieste Contemporanea in co-production with the Museum of Fine Arts in Split and Galerija Kranjčar in Zagreb, and under the patronage of the Consulate General of the Republic of Croatia in Trieste. 
Trieste is the first Italian venue for this new Kipke’s art project, that follows the exhibition curated in November 2019 by critic Vanja Babić at the Galerija Kranjčar in Zagreb.

Željko Kipke (Čakovec 1953) is a painter and a video maker. He studied in the 1970s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and was at the beginning a leading artist in the analytic line of contemporary art and then also a leading director in experimental film.
In the first half of the 1980s he made short films mainly documenting his art performances. During his intense artistic career, among other things, he represented Croatia at the 1993 Venice Biennale and at the 1995 Cairo Biennale. In 2007, again in Venice, he was commissioner of his country’s pavilion. Also important is his activity as an art critic and curator, a theoretician and a writer.

a Trieste Contemporanea production
a Museum of Fine Arts in Split co-production
a Galerija Kranjčar Zagreb co-production
under the patronage of the Consulate General of the Republic of Croatia in Trieste

Željko Kipke 
Dismantling Structures
from 22 February to 16 April, 2020

curator Branko Franceschi

venue: Trieste, Studio Tommaseo (via del Monte 2/1)
opening on Saturday 22 February, at 18.00 p.m.
opening hours: Tuesday-Saturday 17-20 p.m.
free entry

(Top photo: The artist in his studio while preparing the exhibition)