Stipe Nobilo – Retrospective (1976 – 2023)
Juraj Plančić Gallery / Stari Grad Museum
13.07. – 05.09. 2024
The exhibition of Stipe Nobilo’s paintings, conceived in the form of a condensed retrospective of his work up to the contemporary period, consists of characteristic landscapes of his island homeland – Lumbarda on the island of Korčula. The exhibition will showcase 40 oil paintings which are not depicted as literal views of his native landscape, but rather a staging of the Arcadian presence of Korčula’s island landscape, which is in effect an iconic feature of his creativity for more than five decades.
Nobilo’s landscapes – initially characterized by a high vantage point, almost a bird’s eye perspective, which is in later works tilted closer to the horizon – are panoramic compositions in which the reality of the Korčula archipelago is transformed by the imagination of this accomplished painter into a colourful vision of the native landscape and the life in it. It is made up of compositions of the island’s nature and space, captured in totality and filled with terra rossa honeycombs from which cultivated gardens sprout among dry walls. In other words, a multiple orchestration of the colours of the coastal vegetation and the blueness of the bays, which – at the will of the painter – are illuminated by the summer light. They are landscapes that emerged from the collision of realistic and visionary expressions and are unlike any other in Croatian contemporary painting. The landscapes are based on the fusion of Nobilo’s island life – his love of the sea where he fishes and the land he cultivates – with the creative nature of Nobilo the painter. His style is moulded by the colourism of the painter Ivo Dulčić and expressionist painting, which he developed into his characteristic landscapes, distinguished from the multitude of painterly postmodernism in Croatia.
Nobilo’s paintings – chosen for this exhibition from the painter’s carefully guarded studio collection – are a clear confirmation that the island’s rural area is not only the central theme of his painting, but also the source from which he draws strength even at the threshold of the eighth decade of life. From his Lumbarda home, he finds ever fresh ways of depicting his homeland and life in it.
Biserka Rauter Plančić