To start the year 2021, we present the work of Vida Guzmić, the winner of the competition for the production and exhibition of a new work titled “Factory,” under the name “Shadows of Her Paintings.”
During the month of December, the artist used the Gallery space as her studio, a space where processuality and production intertwine. “Naïve for Women” was the working title of the accepted proposal, which involved researching the archive of amateur artist Sofija Guzmić, the artist’s grandmother, and intervening in the collection of her grandmother’s never-before-exhibited paintings. The idea for the work stemmed from continued research into feminist geography, with a focus on the relationship between amateur and professional artistic positions. It is significant that this work is situated in the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, whose activities were associated with amateur art until the mid-1990s.
Sofija Guzmić’s main technique was painting on glass – the back of the paintings indicates that they were created during the 1980s and 1990s. Her paintings were created through copying, tracing, and collaging, techniques also adopted by Vida Guzmić to analyze and gain a deeper understanding of her grandmother’s artistic creation. In this work, the artist experiments with color and light, invoking the senses and experience, making the gallery space a place of close encounter between traditional and contemporary approaches to both artistic and amateur work.
Vida Guzmić (b. 1986, Zagreb) works with painting, video, and sound. She holds a Master’s degree in New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She completed Women’s Studies and the Curatorial Platform program in 2013. She has been exhibiting since 2009 in Croatia and abroad, and was a resident at V2_Summersessions Test Lab, V2_Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam in 2016, and KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna in 2017. She attended the WHW Academy in Zagreb in 2018 and the Home Workspace program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut in 2019. Her recent works explore gender geography, relationships between objects and subjects, and still life. She works as an independent artist and is involved in many collaborative and engaged projects. From 2012 to 2018, she was a member of the collective Space is Tactic. She organizes and leads workshops through Studio Pangolin, an artistic organization she has been a member of since 2013. She is part of the recently formed collective Zvukospjevi (with Nicole Hewitt and Ivana Slipčević). She lives and works in Zagreb.
