Thursday, 5 February 2026 at 7 pm
The artist presents a series of paintings in the spirit of her distinctive visual language, reflecting on contemporary reality and the ways it reaches us through mediation of various media.
In the exhibition catalogue, Feđa Gavrilović, author of the foreword and Director of the Forum Gallery, writes: “In several of the new works, fragments of the motif become fully autonomous, forming independent compositions. Wavy hair is transformed into a stylised ribbon which, once detached from the portrait, may evoke associations with a river or a waterfall. Yet it ultimately remains a detail severed from its original role within the whole - removed from representation itself, and even from a contemporary perception of reality.
This painter’s ways reveal a continual deepening of her reflection on the language of painting - her own personal plein air. She takes a motif from a medium (in other words, from the reality that surrounds her) and transfers it directly onto the canvas with minimal preparation. The only sketches she occasionally makes concern the construction of shadows on specific textures, and even these are rare. The image is carried, as it were, straight from the hand and absorbed into her painterly language.
In doing so, she seems to acknowledge that in a world saturated with technology, our perception of reality has shifted, as her predecessors once observed. Yet rather than commenting on the peculiarities of that perception, she uses it as a stimulus to rediscover what is unique to the language of painting itself, both as a medium and within this particular historical and social moment.”
Petra Grozaj was born in Zagreb in 1974. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Casoria, the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, Künstlerhaus in Graz, Westpol Gallery in Leipzig, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, and DLUL in Ljubljana. She represented Croatia at the 12th Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM) in Naples in 2005.
She has participated in study and residency programmes in Venice, Naples, Paris, Berlin and Leipzig. Her works are held in both private and public collections.
The exhibition is on view until 28 February.
Photographs by Mario Kučera.