Hypermnesia II, installation view © Courtesy Fragment gallery and the artist

Fragment presents a selection of works by Martina Grlić.

Martina Grlić is one of the brightest artists of a new stream of Croatian realism which focuses on the figurative in art and on the narrative potential of the painting. Her images present the uncertainty of memory seeking to question the learned ideologies that participate in the formation of consciousness and identity—and their relation to personal and political reality. As Valerie Mindlin states in Artforum, for Grlić, “what’s recollected is not only fleeting as an unavoidable casualty of time’s passing but is inherently contested as a remainder of Yugoslavia’s transformation from the socialist state in which she was born to a network of European-style capitalist democracies, with the attendant self-imposed erasure and reconstruction of the national past.” Thus do the artist’s works, replete with nostalgic imagery always surfacing and sinking with lurid appeal, become reflections of a public social stance, tableaux of a set of fantasies—even portraits of naive superstitions—which nonetheless persist in contemporary cultural imagining.

In Hypermnesia II, Grlić's first US solo show, presented in New York in May 2022, she floats fragmentary images on an undifferentiated haze of abstraction, mining the ultimately arbitrary cathexis of her childhood experience—especially as it regards symbolic representations of an intimate mythology of the feminine—pointing towards recollections at once personal and political.

The intimate, in Grlić’s oeuvre, is also ideological, and the ideological intimate; hers is an exploration of the symbolic interpolation of what is meant to be the feminine, in socialist society and elsewhere. The striking scarlet bow, featured in The Bow (2022), recalls not only intimate feminine decorations on the head of a child, but also the accountment of public celebration or commemoration, announcing the gift of the glory of the state. Wrapped, like the little girl, in a bow. Here it is decontextualization as a strategy for critical understanding which drives the compositional conceits of the artist. Likewise, the images of costume jewelry and faux flowers in Plastic Gems (2022) or Fake Flowers (2022) function as a tribute to a fallacy: “as carriers of a future feminine”, the artist intones, which like the objects themselves, is as ‘fake’ as it is a cypher for and of intimation—devoutly to be wished. Yet the memories remain: real, lucid, acute, and unreliable.

“Grlić’s engagement with Photorealism’s inherent mnemonic complexity differs from Richter’s in her inevitable cognizance of how memory, in its uneasy orchestration of elements, is complicated by the new omnipresence of the digital interface. But paradoxically, for that very reason, these paintings reward viewing in person. On-screen, their near-fluorescent, quasi-pixelated brashness seems natural and unremarkable, but their physical materiality brings forward the subtly graduated swirls of Grlić’s coloristic modulation and the gentle traces of the manual evident on the surface, marks that are erased when the paintings are viewed in digital reproduction.”

— Valerie Mindlin, Artforum, March 2022

Wishful Thinking, 2022 (detail)

Martina Grlić (b 1982, Croatia) was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb, Croatia. She has exhibited at FRAGMENT; Museum of Mali lošinj; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Kunstlerhaus, Vienna; Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo, China, and the National Museum, Gdanjsk, Poland. She lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. Her works appears in the permanent collections of Modern Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia; Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia, and Erste Bank, Zagreb, Croatia.