Igor Grubić / Artist Talk

One of Grubić’s most famous performances/interactions was Black Peristyle in 1998. He clandestinely painted a black circle in the middle of the peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace in Split, one of the major tourist attractions in Croatia. It was an homage to an action that took place 30 years ago, in 1968, where a group of artists painted the peristyle in red. As in 1968, Grubić’s intervention in 1998 was classified as an act of vandalism against a historical monument by the public authorities.

Presented in the exhibition Group Therapy with works from three different projects East Side Story (2006–2008)‚ Missing Architecture (2012), and Angels with Dirty Faces (2004–2006), Igor Grubic gives an introduction into his artistic practice, with a special focus on the political and cultural situation in Croatia and Serbia in 2001 and 2002. The time when the first Gay Prides took place in Zagreb and Belgrade, which showed the intolerance and violence virulent in the society towards the other and the different. East Side Story is a double projection. One side shows the TV-documentary of the violence in the streets, the other the performative and choreographic transformation into contemporary dance as a public event and demonstration of a different kind.

Igor Grubić (1969) was born in Croatia and lives and works in Zagreb. He is one of Croatia’s most accomplished and internationally acclaimed artists. His work includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, photography, and film. His art is socially and politically engaged and deals with the changes of a society living in transition from state socialism to liberal democracy, from a planned economy to a free market economy. In 2019 he presented Croatia at the 58th Venice Biennale.