Biography
Josip Ivanovic was born in 1961 in Sarajevo, where he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. He studied under Kosta Angeli Radovani, one of the best Croatian sculptors of the 20th century. In Sarajevo he first started using the technique of glass and resin, for which he is renowned in the contemporary art scene, and which is a distinctive feature of his work. During his studies, he met his future wife Nada Zec, a painter with whom he soon moved to Dubrovnik. Upon their arrival in 1988, he absorbed the Mediterranean motifs and visual expressions of Dubrovnik, whose patron, Saint Blaise, began to dominate his work. Over the years he has participated in many exhibitions at home and abroad, the most interesting one being the project titled 18 Artists, 18 cities, through which 18 Croatian artists exhibited their works in capitals around the world. His prolific work includes not only individual sculptures, but also interior, exterior and stage designs, posters, public monuments and fountains, cemetery sculptures, religious motifs and various award designs.
An eminent Croatian art historian, Vlado Buzancic, has repeatedly spoken of Josip Ivanovic as one of the most important sculptors of the Croatian art scene of the early 1990s. His work attracted attention primarily because he used a rare art technique of glass and resin, which could easily arouse the interest of an average viewer, since „beauty is disinterested liking“, as Kant once said. This visual attraction resulted in big media coverage of Ivanovic's first exhibitions, while art historians considered his works interesting for their highly purified forms, good compositional solutions and spatial correlations. Therefore, it was very early on that Ivanovic came to occupy a special place in the Croatian art scene.
Josip Ivanovic's sculptural form is truly minimalistic, although he himself would always jokingly say: “That's my wife“. Free from meticulous interventions and realistic perceptions of proportions, it appears primarily as an artistic fact whose strongpoint is the sculpture itself. It is not a subject of votive or liturgical purposes, it is not socially engaged and it does not point to any problems of the past, the present or the future. Ivanovic’s sculpture is free from the burden of meaning and we perceive it as the ultimate aesthetic experience that it is. It is partly defined by the motif, which determines its form to an extent, but does not influence its artistic semantics. In conclusion, Ivanovic's sculpture, based on the principle of l'art pour l'art, is self-sufficient, aesthetically very seductive, free from meaning and able to speak its own visual language in its communication with the viewer.
Ever since his early works – reliefs and sculptures of female nudes - Ivanovic has been aspiring to simplify the form. His female figures are often made without the upper extremities, with simplified torsos, hips and legs and a unified form of the elements of the head. Over the years, the formal reduction has evolved, along with the technique, which has led to the simplification of the process of implementing an artistic idea. The coloring of sculptures has always been a great passion of Ivanovic’s. Therefore, it is not surprising that the artist has made a large number of art works using other techniques, such as painting, graphics and reliefs made from crushed glass. Ennobled by the colors of the Mediterranean, his coloristic impetus has matured over the years. As sculpting is a long lasting process, whatever the artist could not immediately transfer onto a clay model, he sketched on paper. Some of these sketches are colored and together they make a special, rich collection of drawings. His Skizzenbücher represent a whole world of artistic imagination that testifies to the artist's agility, his libertarian approach to art and remarkable imagination. Ivanovic's motto Nulla dies sine linea is confirmed daily through his work.