Open Studio 2025 – Artist Residency
Venue: 10ka, GMK, Šubićeva 29
Duration: September 19 – October 14, 2025
The tenth edition of the Open Studio program continues the ongoing series of unique residencies at the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, reaffirming its role in supporting artists and their research processes. The program was initiated out of the need to create informal conditions for encounters between artists and the public, as well as to provide artists with a fundamental resource – space – within which they can develop their practices free from the pressures of production deadlines and market expectations.
With this program, the GMK curatorial team expands the role of the exhibition space, utilizing its potential as an open site for dialogue between artists and the public. Each month, the gallery space is entrusted to artists who use it as a studio, while having full access to all gallery resources (technical, production, and curatorial support). At the same time, the public is invited to step into the working process, to witness experiments, reflections, and the dilemmas of creation, thereby dismantling and demystifying the very process of artistic work.
In previous years, the Open Studio has hosted a number of significant artists whose work has shaped the critical discourse of the local scene. For example, in 2024 the residency featured Dora Fodor and Iva Peručić, who in their joint research We are not made of sugar experimented with the materiality of installation by using cotton candy as both a pop-cultural and material symbol of transience. At the same time, Željko Beljan explored the Borovo factory archive and the pioneering phenomenon of a women’s football team from 1938, presenting the results through an installation and an artist book.
In this continuity, the space now welcomes Leonardo Losciale with his research Aristophanes’ Dilemma, while the date and time of the public presentation of the results will be announced at a later stage.
A brief overview of the research Aristophanes’ Dilemma
Leonardo Losciale maps the specific character of the 10ka gallery space, a container-like architecture situated beneath the massive building on Šubićeva Street. Spatial contradictions—visibility and concealment, permeability and closure—serve as the starting point for his exploration of new perceptual models, the fragility of materiality, and the potential of ephemeral forms.
The starting point of the work is smoke—an element whose ephemerality is linked to Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, where the deceptive and shifting nature of rhetoric is revealed. Losciale connects this motif to today’s “clouds,” digital archives whose fragmentation and control become a metaphor for the contemporary layering of identity. Through the use of mirrors, ventilation elements, and found materials, the artist interrogates space as a political device, a site of memory, and transformation.
Artist Biography
Leonardo Losciale (1985, Italy) is a visual artist and musician. He graduated in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2024. His work spans sculpture, site-specific installations, performative objects, video, and experimental sound practice. Thematically, he engages with philosophical and political concepts such as potential (dynamis), the state of exception, relational aesthetics, and the limits of form, drawing on theoretical sources including Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Carl Schmitt.
He has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in Croatia (Salon mladih, Croatian Sculpture Triennial, Gallery SC, Gallery Šira, Garaža Kamba, Gallery Augustinčić, and Diocletian’s Cellars in Split), and has also taken part in international sculpture schools in Vrsar and Brtonigla, as well as in workshops dedicated to collective practices in Graz, Ljubljana, Trieste, and Zagreb.
Alongside his visual practice, he is also active as a classical musician – a timpanist with the Zagreb Philharmonic and an award-winning soloist. His work synthesizes sound, body, space, and theory, wherein sculpture becomes an instrument and emptiness a material of articulation.
He lives and works in Zagreb.
Program Information
Title: Open Studio 2025
Resident Artist: Leonardo Losciale
Research Title: Aristophanes’ Dilemma
Venue: 10ka, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Šubićeva 29
Duration: September 19 – October 14, 2025
Program Type: Residency with public presentation
GMK Managers: Tea Matanović, Antonela Solenički
Production: GMK
Open Studio Program is supported by: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb
GMK’s work is supported by: Kultura nova Foundation, INA d.d.
