Fishing and Conversation about Apoxyomenos, Mirrors, and a Few Other Things by Ante Rašić
Stari Grad Museum
July, 25th – September, 10th 2025
Opening: July, 25th at 9pm
The Croatian Apoxyomenos, a work by Ante Rašić, is an interpretation of the ancient sculpture discovered in 1996 in the seabed near the islet of Vele Orjule in the Lošinj archipelago. It is an imposing, nine-meter-tall colossal replica in a neo-mannerist spirit, adorned with six hundred mobile mirrors. Depending on the exhibition space, the artist uses this work to connect the spirit of antiquity with the past and the present, with the eras of historicism, neoclassicism, pre-Romanesque art, and today’s postpostmodernity. The work can be categorised within the expanded field of sculpture, of a conceptual, site-specific, and ambient character. The sculpture is part of a series of works entitled 1001 Views, based on the concept of the ready-made. They feature palindromic qualities and duality, reflected in the use of a mobile bathroom mirror from IKEA. The artist eliminates the object’s utilitarian function and uses it as a fundamental optical-visual building element in his creations. “This industrial element now becomes a mobile sculpture that contains the driving force of the entire environment – it provides both a source and reflection of light, and with it, a new meaning and multilayered interpretations of all Rašić’s objects, which are never completely finished, but await the space and the audience to complete them.”* Since the sculpture is conceived and created for a large space, beyond the standard dimensions of our museums and gallery venues, in the Stari Grad Museum the artist presents it through the mediums of photography and video. In this case, photography is not merely a reproduction or simple documentation, but a new, independent artistic form – an artifact that gives the sculpture additional value. Thus, even after its dismantling and “disappearance,” the work, through the medium of photography, transforms and materializes into a new form, offering viewers a new visual experience, interpretation, perception, and reception. * Mladen Lučić, from the text Croatian Apoxyomenos exhibited in the desacralized church of the Sacred Hearts in Pula as part of Ante Rašić’s exhibition “Art is Beautiful”, 2012.