DAVID MALJKOVIC
2008
29,9 x 22,4 cm each
Unique
Inv. Nr. 113
Photo: courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
Born in 1973 in Rijeka, Croatia
Lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia
David Maljkovic’s practice engages with the Croatian memory of the landscape and the heritage of modern utopias, both in its theoretical and practical manifestations, particularly through architecture and its social implications. His films, drawings, sculptures and installations often evoke monuments and pavilions built during the sixties and seventies in former Yugoslavia, and which have now been neglected or forgotten. The artist evokes the failure of an architecture designed to promise a better future, thus conveying a feeling of melancholy. The series Parallel Compositions is filled with this sensation of despair. The photographs show a single legless chair scrutinized in all possible positions, as an object of study that has lost its use.
Maljkovic has developed a collage work that has revived modernist constructions with recent documentation, as in From Lost Review. This series is based on the Zagreb Fair, a major economic event during the fifties and sixties, which used to link East and West in the context of Cold War. The collages gather excerpts from reviews and brochures published to present the fair’s success and recent drawings of this venue of former achievements.
After Giuseppe Sambito continues the artist’s research about this fair by referring to the architect of the Italian pavilion that was completed in 1961. The memory of this modernist building has inspired the rehabilitation of some formal elements of the architecture by the artist. Maljkovic is deeply influenced by modernist aesthetics, whether in the construction of his images or in his display structures, which acquire a true sculptural presence.