On Sunday, November 15th2020, Ivan Kožarić, a renowned Croatian sculptor and academic, who also took part to the Forma Viva Symposium, died in Zagreb.
Kožarić (born in 1921 in Petrinja) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he also specialized under the guidance of prof. Anton Augustinčić. Crucial for his artistic development were a few months of study in Paris, where he had the opportunity to get to know the trends of European art. In the early 1960s, he was a member of the Gorgona informal art group. His exhibition history is rich, including as many as sixty solo shows and over two hundred group exhibitions, in Slovenia and abroad. Among the latter stand out the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennial and Documenta in Kassel. His works are now part of the permanent collection of the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. They can be found in galleries and museums all around the world, including the New York Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, as well as the Forma Viva Portorož Collection of Stone Sculptures.
Kožarić also participated to many sculptural symposia from the 1950s to the 1980s in the area of former Yugoslavia (Bačka Topola 1958, Aranđelovac 1968, Labin 1970, Cazin, Ostrožac 1975). In 1981 he was also invited to Forma viva Portorož (Miroslav Chlupač, Yutaka Okano, Bjørn Nørgard, Leonard Rachita, Đjorđije Crnčević).
Following his artistic expression defined by reductionism and abstracted sculptural form, he carved a statue entitled The Stone. His minimal interventions, the schematic play of notches and the smooth detail of a rectangular dent leave the plastic form indefinite, thus opposing to the formal and elaborate statues in the immediate vicinity. The sculpture has preserved ist original position at the roadside sign, as envisioned by the sculptor, to symbolically mark the path to the core of the Seška gallery.
