Dear visitors and friends,
we are pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition ART & CRAFT on Tuesday, 21 June 2022 at 9pm, in Stari Grad Museum’s Juraj Plančić Gallery.
The exhibition will present sculptures by academic sculptor Iva Mihanović and wooden tables by Stan Coenders, debating the concepts of arts & craft and will be open until 17 July 2022.
Arts and Crafts was originally the name of a movement that emerged in the second half of the 19th century in England as a reaction to the application of motifs from the so-called “fine arts” to industrially designed objects. Its ideologists endorsed a return to arts and crafts modelled on medieval guilds. For them, a handmade object was the only true form of authentic human creativity and self-realization. Today, the term “applied arts” is used in English primarily as a synonym for “craft”, while its original meaning has been lost. […]
Academic sculptor Iva Mihanović creates sculptures that reflect the power of perception and enhanced intuition. Her sculptures are light objects. The starting point are the forms of geometric predetermination with a clear order, clean proportions, and what continuously presents a new challenge, sort of a game, is the juggling with numerous possibilities of “cheating” the symmetry. Each ball, or some other sculptural body, is a polygon for unlimited play with variations in shifts, breaks and transformation of the parts of a sculptural body.
Iva Mihanović is an academic sculptor with a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb, where she graduated in 2008, in the class of Professor Slavomir Drinković. She’s a multimedia artist with the status of a freelance artist, member of the Croatian Freelance Artists Association (HZSU) since 2011. She prefers to present her artistic work through the medium of sculpture and ambient light, and she skilfully expresses herself in the techniques of weaving and scenography. The specific style of sculpture with precise execution ultimately emphasizes the applied art, the functionality and aesthetics of the work of art and form. She finds inspiration in nature and its phenomena, ancient symbolism and the laws of geometry and the ancient practice of yoga and Vedic architecture. She practices healing through art and movement and runs art workshops and yoga classes.
Stan Coenders was always interested in the position of art and artists in society. He founded several projects (WaddenArt, MeetingInZdonov) with the specific aim to find out, through real and well financed, well organized and documented art events, how a rural conservative society would accept artists with a different view, a different creativity, and at the same time how artists, young and experienced, position themselves in such an environment.
We invite you all to the Museum and look forward to your visit!