Goran Trbuljak: Before and After Retrospective

Curated by Andrea Bellini

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is happy to host Before and After Retrospective, the first retrospective of Zagreb-based artist Goran Trbuljak. 

Trbuljak belongs to the generation of artists from former Yugoslavia who explored varied means of overcoming the modernist tradition, known as the New Art Practice. In comparison to many of his contemporaries in Zagreb and around the world, whose conceptual art practices continued in the spirit of late modernism by exalting the artist and the aura of the artwork, Trbuljak’s strategy was, nevertheless, notably distinctive. With his modest, self-effacing, unpretentious, and intimate works he exposed the inner conflict he experienced as an artist and embraced the paradox of art’s self-negating tactics by persistently exploring and probing the margins between art and anti-art, the artist and the non-artist.

At the height of the conceptual art movement, some 50 years ago, Trbuljak explored the role of the artist in satirical, often melancholic works that took his own weaknesses as their creative starting-point and established him as a forerunner of the postmodern sensibility.

The exhibition in Geneva will feature highlights from Trbuljak’s works of the last 50 years, encompassing paintings, frottages, monochromes and monograms, photographs, films, books and documentations of his street actions. This exhibition will travel in January 2019 to MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy.

A monograph will also be launched on the occasion of this retrospective. Entitled Before and After Retrospective, it has been edited by the artist himself and Tevž Logar, in collaboration with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin; Snaporazverein, Zurich and Erste Foundation, Vienna. It communicates a number of interests and important issues which have been the focus of Trbuljak’s complex artistic practice over the past 45 years. Via theoretical essays (by Ivana Bago, Andrea Bellini, Jerko Denegri and Christian Rattemeyer) and an interview (by Vit Havranek) the publication addresses specific elements of Trbuljak’s work with a rich iconography and presents key developments in Trbuljak’s practice.

Goran Trbuljak was born in 1948 in Croatia. He lives and works in Zagreb. His work has been presented at Carré d’art, Nîmes; New Museum, New York; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz; Museion Bolzano; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Centre Pompidou, Paris, as well as at the 51st Venice Biennale.