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12/5/2004

Stipo Pranyko

IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia

The Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) is inaugurating an exhibition about the work of the Bosnian artist Stipo Pranyko from 13 May to 29 August 2004. The exhibition presents Pranyko's intense, spiritual, purified world through 80 works which include an extensive selection of drawings, objects/pictorial pieces and sculptures representative of his period of maturity developed between 1975 and 2003.
This exhibition of Stipo Pranyko, an artist not well known in Spain, who works outside the commercial circuits of contemporary art, forms part of the series that the IVAM is devoting to artists who have experienced physical displacement as the basis of their artistic language. Pranyko's work eliminates not only the incidental but also all that might have a pretension of solemnity in his artistic proposal. In his collages and pictorial objects he uses poor materials such as cloth, rice, paper, cellulose, nails, plastic tubes, rags, gauze and found objects. This experimentation with materials has linked him to art movements of the sixties, especially Arte Povera, although his condition as a wanderer has made him a constructor of his own artistic territories.

Born in the Bosnian town of Jajce in 1930, Pranyko is a nomad artist who forms part of the Yugoslav culture displaced after the Second World War.
His life's wanderings have led him to develop his work in various countries in Europe, where he has gradually purified his poetics and his artistic practice, finally coming to make his home in Tahíche, in Lanzarote (Canary Islands).
In the mid-fifties he embarked on an artistic practice linked to conventional languages. But it was in the early sixties that he began to explore the problematics of his work after coming into contact with Fontana, Manzoni, Castellani and Bonalumi. In 1962 he went to live in Milan and there he met Piero Manzoni, one of the precursors of Arte Povera. In those years he became interested in the picture surface, manipulating it in order to break up the two-dimensionality of painting, and he adopted a monochrome treatment which, in the course of time, has become a constant feature of his work.
In the mid-seventies, when he was living in Germany, he produced work consisting of singular reiterated forms which point to the absurdity of life, and he converted his own wanderings into the source for his art, which is that of an artist with no hope and no native land. In 1979 he went to live in Alsace, moving to Lanzarote in 1990. During the nineties Pranyko persisted with his poor materials and his austere language, opening it up to a more conceptual confrontation with architectural space through the use of tangents, metal bars or strips of wood connected to his objects and entering the floor of the gallery, physically invading it and expanding the inherent space of the picture or object, and he accentuated the writhing of his canvases, charged with dramatism.

Pranyko is distanced from the world of art, immersed in the silence of his own solitariness, a motionless traveller now, producing works conceived as the portable gear of the wanderer: they are flexible, transformable, liable to receive the scrapes and injuries of life, incorporating wear and deterioration as yet another of the consubstantial marks of existence. The category of time thus proves decisive in Pranyko's work, in permanent dialogue with life, death, illness, disappearance, aging, pain, sacrifice and abandonment, which shape the poetic climate of his creative world.
The catalogue published to accompany the exhibition includes pictures and essays about Stipo Pranyko's work written by Vicente Valero, José Jiménez, the director of the IVAM Kosme de Barañano and the curator of the exhibition Fernando Gómez Aguilera, who for years has maintained a close complicity with the artist.

IVAM- Institut Valencià d'Art Modern
Guillem de Castro 118, 46003 Valencia
Telf: +34 96 38 67680
Fax: +34 96 39 21094

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