work in progress, private space, Sisak & Zagreb (HR) 2003-2009
reenactment with Dino Škare, MMC / Student Center, Zagreb (HR), 2009
With the ritual personal hygiene of hair clipping and scratching the scalp with his ∫nger nails, the artist has amassed a multi-year collection of deposits of hair, water and sebaceous Ωuid from his scalp that is now approximately the size of a tennis ball. The material accumulated in the process of making this bodily sculpture is “gray greenish mud that quickly covers the whole scalp, making it look like a freshly plowed ∫eld”. The artist’s work in progress presented as an installation or live performancestresses the paranoia induced by a crisis of cultural identity. Crtalić develops a paranoid attitude towards his own thoughts and feelings as “products of globalized identity ‘colonization’”. This is further present in the need for purity in the frame of “my own demented obsessive- compulsive boosting of my own deficiencies”
Marijan Crtalić (HR)
I was born in 1968 in Sisak, Croatia. In 1992 I received a graduate degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. After my studies, I began exploring media such as video, photography, performance etc. My work develops from my personal relation to myself and the interaction with my surroundings. The direction my work takes – whether it involves a documentary or symbolic approach to the matter - depends on my own experience in a specific spatial-situational context. Different situations produce different types of expression, ranging from an analytical-investigative approach to the intuitive-emotional, more or less symbolic artistic reaction.
In any case, the common denominator behind all my activities is a social, engaged questioning and artistic (re)action aiming for a critical insight into specific social issues, especially those in which I am also personally involved. My work was exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad: in Slovenia, Serbia, Albania, Austria, Italy, Macedonia, Romania, Czech Republic, France, Germany, USA, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Poland, Lebanon. I received the award of the 1st Youth Salon, Sisak/CZK, Sisak, 2000, award of the 26th Youth Salon, Zagreb, 2001 and the AICA award at the 36th Zagreb Salon.
