Željko Jerman: Death in Korkyra – From the MSU Collection

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the death of Željko Jerman (Zagreb, 1949 – Korčula, 2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU), in collaboration with Grey Zone (Siva Zona), a space for contemporary and media art in Korčula, presents an exhibition as part of a broader programme taking place in Korčula and Zagreb. In this way, a symbolic dialogue is established between the city where the artist was born and the city he referred to as his “working city”, where he died prematurely.

The exhibition at MSU also serves as a reminder of the artist’s early connection with the institution, which recognised the significance of Jerman’s work from the very beginning of his artistic career. A selection of works from the MSU collection, accompanied by documentation from the museum archives and a smaller selection of documentary materials from private archives, traces several key stages of his practice. Alongside a number of canonical works and rarely exhibited pieces, the exhibition spans the period from his earliest Subjective Photographs, a series first presented in 1975 at the then Gallery of Contemporary Art as part of the programme of the Centre for Photography, Film and Television (CEFFT), to the photo-paintings created in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, including works made in Korčula.

Although Jerman was one of the most radical explorers of the photographic medium in Croatian art, his practice was never confined to questions of the medium itself. At a time when artists associated with the analytical current of conceptual art were rationally examining the conditions under which an image is produced and breaking the medium down into its basic components, Jerman applied similar premises to photography, while developing a distinctly different approach. Rejecting the camera and reducing photography to light, trace, chemical process and the materiality of photographic paper, he transformed these elements into a means of inextricably intertwining art and life.

Twenty years after the artist’s death, this dialogue between Zagreb and Korčula pays tribute to an artist who transformed the traces of his own existence into one of the most striking chapters of Croatian contemporary art.