Mirko Zrinšćak: Sculptures

Mirko Zrinšćak (1953, Volosko, Croatia) has placed nine monumental wooden sculptures – whose pronounced verticals create subtle effects – in a dialogue with the space represented by the former monastery church. In the right light, these sculptures appear to float in space. In terms of content, the works are a continuation of the exploration of sculptural form begun by the artist in 2008 with the installation of his exhibition Forms of Space in Zagreb’s Art Pavilion. The artist continues his search for the ideal form, which in his words is a sublimation of all forms of his own personal archipelago, in the former monastery church in Kostanjevica na Krki. This search should be understood as the artist’s intimate meditation and search, which in Zrinšćak’s case is not a method but rather derives directly from his way of life, wholly dedicated to sculpture. This is why we can also understand Zrinšćak’s sculptures in the field of the sublime as an artistic statement based on experience. Any kind of insight requires profound attention from the viewer, a kind of haptic state in which an instinctive desire for tactility appears, when in the silence we start to pick up vibrations that we then feel somewhere in our gut, and hear the sounds of timelessness, when from far back in the past we also hear the here and now.