Finalists 2012: Lauba’s Acquisitions

Until January 28th, Lauba, the House for People and Art, will feature the large selling exhibition Finalists 2012: Lauba’s Acquisitions. At the same time, until January 6th, visitors will have the opportunity to see the latest works by Lovro Artuković, one of Lauba’s finalists.

For the first time, Lauba, the House for People and Art, is organizing a selling exhibition of works by contemporary Croatian artists of younger and middle-age generations, titled Finalists 2012: Lauba’s Acquisitions. The exhibition will be open from December 6th until January 28th, and it will feature works by authors who usually exhibit at this gallery and are part of the gallery’s Filip Trade collection. Lauba boasts a large collection of art, but this is the first time some will be offered for sale.

Lauba’s first “final” was held in 2009, and this year’s edition will present works by eleven artists who have enjoyed Lauba’s support for some time now, and some of whom have managed to gain an enviable reputation around the world; Lovro Artuković, Ivana Franke, Ivan Fijolić, Alem Korkut, Kristian Kožul, Viktor Popović, Marko Tadić, Igor Ruf, Silvio Vujić, Stipan Tadić and Zlatan Vehabović.

Lovro Artuković is certainly the most popular and respected among them. He will be exhibiting his latest works at an exhibition which will remain open until January 6th. For the first time, the Croatian public will see his works Ari in a Trash Costume and Giuliano (in a creation by Manuela Pott) with his dog Vino. True to his trademark expression, the most recent works are a sequence to the previous paintings in the series Models Posing for Pieta and Pieta in Reverse, i.e. the artist’s depiction of “real” situations from his own atelier.

This time they are portraits of his friends from Berlin – restaurant owner Giuliano and female dancer Ari, in costumes created for them by someone else. The portraits of the artist’s models in historical costumes tie the new and fashionable Berlin culture with details from history, while special attention is paid to overall set design in the atelier. In the case of the singer Ari, this is particularly prominent as the artist combines old and new fashions to achieve a strong trash effect. Artuković parodies the idea of Berlin as a city of fashion, and the effect is accentuated by the bearers of the costumes who pose for the artist on a spectacularly designed stage, as a result of which all sorts of different myths may be gleaned from the painting.

Lovro Artuković was born in Zagreb in 1959. He has been living and working in Berlin since 2003. For nine years he worked as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He has exhibited at numerous group and individual exhibitions in Croatia as well as abroad. Two films have been made about his work: an experimental film, Theft (Lukas Nola, 2004), and the documentary film, L.A. Unfinished (Igor Mirković, 2008), while in 2001 he received the Annual Award for the best exhibition by the Croatian Association of Artists.