The exhibition “Don’t Worry About Poetics, It Will Come On Its Own“, which is organised as part of the European Capital of Culture project, will combine Petercol’s paintings, spatial interventions, light installations, sketches and photographs and will shed a new light on his art, as well as the act of producing art itself, which the artist skilfully demystifies.

A retrospective exhibition of the prominent visual artist Goran Petercol entitled “Don’t Worry About Poetics, It Will Come On Its Own“ will be held at the Rijeka Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art as part of the European Capital of Culture project. The exhibition will be open to the public from 22 November at 7 pm to 5 January 2020.

It is the fourth retrospective exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art as part of the Season of Power flagship of the European Capital of Culture, which puts an emphasis on power structures, among other topics, and examines their full range, from their destructive to their creative potential and from violence and oppression to the triumph of free will. So far, large-scale retrospective exhibitions by Tomislav Gotovac, Goran Trbuljak and Vlado Martek have been held as part of the flagship, with the latest retrospective by Goran Petercol serving as a natural extension, since he is an artist who indirectly yet permanently confronts the art system that is silently institutionalising and unifying methods of creation and principles of art production. In that sense, one can draw the conclusion that all his works primarily deal with issues pertaining to the purpose of creating.

Petercol constructed his visual language, which alternates from deliberately dry and austere to seductive, by deconstructing painting. This is why you will often hear him say that “colour is a type of surface matter (as is light)”. As one of the protagonists of the 70s neo-avant-garde scene in Zagreb, Petercol stood out from the aforementioned milieu in which many obsolete art principles were subverted by cancelling convention instead of eschewing it in advance. Sabina Salamon, the curator of the exhibition, stated that “when he attempts to follow convention, he is drawn away from the expected result towards unexpected varieties. If we take the most typical example of creating by observing motifs, it is evident that Petercol definitely observes, but not in a conventional manner, because he sees what conventionally remains unnoticed: the edge of the paper format instead of its central surface, the space between the pillar in the exhibition space and the artwork, silhouettes instead of objects.”

The exhibition “Don’t Worry About Poetics, It Will Come On Its Own“ will combine Petercol’s paintings, spatial interventions, light installations, sketches and photographs. At the same time, it will shed a new light on Petercol’s art, as well as the act of producing art itself, which the artist skilfully demystifies.

Goran Petercol was born in Pula in 1949. He can add studying at the Faculty of Maritime Studies, sailing on merchant marine ships, graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (1975) and completing a two-year graduate programme at the Master Workshop of the Croatian Academy in Zagreb (1978) to his CV. He worked as an art director for encyclopaedias and lexicons at the Institute of Lexicography in Zagreb and taught at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka from 2007 to 2014. Since 1975, he has been exhibiting works that centre on the processes, limits, conventions and subversions of conceptual structures. He is perhaps best known for his light installations, which he started displaying in 1985.

Petercol’s monograph, which attempts to elucidate the artist’s fields of interest from the mid-1970s to the present day, will be promoted at the exhibition on 5 December at 7 p.m. The texts in the monograph were written by Chris Sharp, Miško Šuvaković, Sabina Salamon, Vladimir Vidmar and Sabine Schaschl. In addition to the monograph promotion, several workshops for various age groups will be organised, as well as guided tours for the public: an artist-guided tour on 28 November and curator-guided tours on 12 and 19 December, all at 7 p.m.