program

from 28 February to 8 April 2025

Đorđe Jandrić

Kodikamo hrpa / far and away a heap

Trieste Contemporanea is pleased to present, in co-production with the Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the exhibition of Đorđe Jandrić: Kodikamo hrpa / Far and Away a Heap , a project that explores the boundary between physical and digital art.
The exhibition is organized as part of the initiative “Dialogues with the Art of Central Eastern Europe”, with the support of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (under the collective brand Io Sono Friuli Venezia Giulia) along with the collaboration of Studio Tommaseo.
The inauguration is scheduled for Friday 28 February at 6 pm at Via del Monte 2/1. In a brief conversation, Janka Vukmir, the Croatian artist and the curator of the exhibition, will introduce Jandrić’s artistic world.

In Trieste, two series of works by Jandrić are on display. The first two depict ‘accumulations’ (heaps) of numbers and QR codes which are drawn on paper in graphite with meticulous precision. They are drawings that confirm and reaffirm the importance of a manual production procedure. The third set, ‘initially one does not know it exists at all,’ writes Janka Vukmir. In fact, Jandrić’s exhibition, shown at the ICA Zagreb last April, requires the public to interact and scan the QR codes that lead to a third series of work, hidden in the digital world and revealed beyond the two-dimensional plane of drawing.

“But what exactly are these heaps of Jandrić’s?” continues the curator. “His professional biography states that he studied architecture, which he abandoned in favour of studying sculpture, never once having abandoned the basic principles of spatial thinking in his work. He is interested in numbers, drawing, geometry, space, volume, concept, analysis and context, virtually the basics of planning. When he introduced in his work the idea of the heap 30 years ago, this was actually the reflection of the attitude that a heap of any material is a potential sculpture and that a sculpture can be executed in any material and medium since, alongside its three-dimensionality, it also attains its volume with the accumulation of imagined content, and not merely by the materiality of form. To Jandrić, nearly everything is a heap, and every heap is a sculpture. Everything is a sculpture, Jandrić asserted in conversation during the preparations for his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. These drawings of heaps are also to be understood in this manner, as deconstructed sculptures broken down into sequences of two-dimensional drawings, planes.”

Jandrić thus invites the audience to reconsider the concept of the ‘heap’, which in the artist’s work transcends its purely material dimension and becomes a symbol of a continuous process of accumulation and transformation, both material and conceptual. Vukmir explains that these piles symbolised by a triangle and a circle inscribed into a square, constitute a nearly Euclidian principle of the analysis of structure, space, and changes.

In the codified act of opening the digital space where the third group of works dwell, new relationships are introduced, and this further accumulation raises questions about the role of observer participation and the evolution of art perception in the hybrid contemporary visual context.

The exhibition can be visited through 8 April 2025 (Studio Tommaseo, Via del Monte 2/1; open Tues-Fri 5-8pm, free admission)

Đorđe Jandrić (Zadar, 1956) studied architecture at the University of Zagreb from 1975 to 1978 when he interrupted his studies to enrol at the Academy of Fine Arts and studied art history in the Philosophy Department. He graduated in 1985 (J. Biffel, J. Poljan). He began exhibiting his work at the 13th Youth Salon in Zagreb in 1981. Between 1992 and 1994 he was art director of the «Kinoteka» magazine. In 2005 he represented Croatia at the Statue and Object exhibition in Bratislava and in 2008 at the Europart exhibition in Geneva. From 2007 to 2022 he taught at the Academy of Applied Arts at the University of Rijeka. He lives and works in Zagreb and to this date has held over thirty solo exhibitions and participated in some eighty group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. In his continued research into the concept of sculpture, he expresses himself in almost all visual media (sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, video, film).

Janka Vukmir is an art historian, curator and art critic. She is the co-founder (1998) and president of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Previously she served as the Deputy Director (1993-1996) and then Director (1996-1998) of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Zagreb. She is the curator of the Radoslav Putar Prize, which she founded in 2002, and in 2025 she became the president of AICA-Croatia.

Read the introductory text by Janka Vukmir