Object Without Dignity

Sculptures from the Interscapes series dating from the early 1990s, and multimedia installations from the Collectors series created in 2000, are part of the opus donated by the internationally renowned artist Duba Sambolec called “Object Without Dignity”. Visitors to Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art will have the opportunity to see it until 2 September.

Questioning the visual perception and language of the three-dimensional media of sculpture and multimedia, and dealing with social, philosophical and artistic dilemmas have been the themes of the oeuvre by the internationally renowned artist Duba Sambolec since the 1970s. Visitors to Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art will have the opportunity to see these works until 2 September at the exhibition called “Object Without Dignity”, which consists of 15 installations created while the artist lived in Norway between 1993 and 2005.

It is a valuable donation which Duba Sambolec, the Slovenian artist who lives and works between Ljubljana and Oslo, gave to Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007. Citizens of Zagreb had the opportunity to see a similar opus in 1998 when the exhibition, then called “Divided Zones”, was featured at the gallery on Katarina’s square and the Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Museum of Contemporary Art also added multimedia installations from the Collectors series, created in 2000, to the exhibition. These works of art were also donated by the artist in 2007.

Duba Sambolec was born in Ljubljana in 1949, and she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1975. She left for Norway in 1992 and there she worked as an art professor and the head of the Sculpting department at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts. As of 1998 she was also a professor at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.

Throughout her prolific artistic opus, she has gone through several different phases of questioning art. In the early 1980s she created sculptures in which she combined materials with contrasting features (lead, bitumen, wax, brass) which symbolize the bifurcation of elementary principles in life – difficult/easy, male/female, soft/hard…

Throughout the 1990s she created large-scale installations known as the Interscapes series in which she focused on the reception of the position of the object, as well as the observers and their interrelation Although these works have already been presented, even those who have seen them will be pleasantly surprised by their display in the space of the new Museum of Contemporary Art, which was opened in 2009, as it places the entire opus into a new, more modern environment.

Apart from working in Norway and Slovenia, the artist has gained her valuable international reputation by participating in numerous exhibitions and prestigious international events around the globe, such as the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paolo Biennale. Croatian audiences have been following her ever since she took her first artistic steps, but especially since 1979 when her exhibition at Zagreb’s Student Centre Gallery was proclaimed as one of the turning points in the affirmation of postmodern sculpture in Croatia.