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Branko Vlahović and Ivan Kožarić in Other Primary Structures

03/10/2014

On March 14, the Jewish Museum of New York City will open a two-part exhibition, Other Primary Structures, featuring Croatian artists Branko Vlahović and Ivan Kožarić along with other internationally recognized artists from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Designed to revisit the seminal 1966 exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, which introduced the American public to a new mode of expression now known as Minimalism, Other Primary Structures also seeks to expand the discussion of Minimalism and include artists beyond those popularly associated with the movement, such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt.

Branko Vlahović (1924-1979) is showing in the first installment of the exhibition from March 14 to May 18. With the recent restoration of several of his sculptures and a retrospective exhibition in December 2012, Vlahović has only more recently begun to claim his place as an outstanding representative of Minimalism in Croatia. After completing his postgraduate studies in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and studying in Paris, Vlahović worked as a primary school teacher in Zagreb and Karlovac. He dedicated his spare time to his artistic practice, using raw, industrial materials such as wood and sheet metal to create geometric sculptures. According to historian and art critic Guido Quien, Vlahović was devoted to unraveling the fundamentals of sculptural language, ultimately minimizing subjectivity to maximize the objectivity of form.

Unlike many of his Croatian contemporaries, Vlahović was not associated with a local artist group (such as Gorgona), and was therefore considered something of a loner within the region, although he was actively engaging with a new, global artistic sensibility. His inclusion in Other Primary Structures will, finally, position him alongside his international contemporaries.

Although his work is not predominantly guided by a desire to pare down and simplify form, sculptor Ivan Kožarić has demonstrated some minimalist tendencies, namely a sustained interested in the relationship between forms and space. During the 1960s especially, he was concerned with giving form to the empty space within structures. Work by Kožarić will be exhibited in the second installment of Other Primary Structures from May 25 to August 3. Find out more about Kožarić here.