Light inside the sculpture

The first mention of Jovan Kratohvil comes from 1934, when as a seven-year-old he won the junior and youth championships of Yugoslavia in small-caliber rifles, and at the age of 14 he won the senior championship. Just a few years later, he won first place in the breaststroke at the youth national championship in Zagreb, and then he achieved the fastest time in Yugoslavia in the 100-meter swim.

After finishing high school, he enrolled Academy of Fine Arts, the sculpture department in the class of Sreten Stojanović, in order to temporarily stop his studies due to his decision to join the partisan movement. After the end of the war, he finished his studies as one of the ten best students of Belgrade University and became an assistant to Professor Stojanović. In parallel with his successful academic and sports career, where he won a silver medal at the World Championship in Argentina in 1949, and then participated in the Olympic Games in Helsinki and broke state records in archery, he performed his first two public monuments on Majevica and Aviaticar Square in Zemun. Suddenly, in 1953, he decided to leave his sports career so that he could fully devote himself to art and teaching. In addition to sculpture, he was engaged in drawing, painting and graphics. Exhibited is part of a large number of group, local and international exhibitions, and he also organized eleven solo exhibitions between 1955 and 1983. He won the Belgrade October Award for the Monument to Soviet Military Veterans at Avala in 1966. In the same year, he also exhibited at the Venice Biennale. His sculpture was on the cover of the catalog of the exhibition "Contemporary Yugoslav Sculpture" in London in 1970. As a full professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, he also held the position of dean, and from 1971 to 1973 he was rector of the University of Arts.

His rich artistic oeuvre has just been presented in a retrospective exhibition Composition 100/24 in the National Museum of Serbia. Starting with figuration in the domain of partisan art and socialist realism, Jovan Kratohvil very quickly moved towards a more reduced expression and the discovery of a more personal artistic handwriting, which led him to research different forms and materials, unambiguously moving towards an increasingly abstract expression. This place will present works from his last creative phase, which crowned the artist's decades of work.

photo: from the documentation of the Kratohvil family

Full-volume airy sculptures with fluid geometrized centers of different colors were created in the late seventies and early eighties of the 20th century in the studio of sculptor Jovan Kratohvil. Nothing like them had been seen before. They seemed harmonious, self-sufficient and completely abstract. They are made of polyester, a plastic resin that required a different genesis of the sculpture. It could no longer be created by sculpting or carving, as well as by welding metal elements, which Kratohvil used previously. They were created by pouring liquid resin into a mold, adapting the author's idea and his next move to the cooling speed of the material, forming and molding new liquid layers, as well as dipping linear elements into polyester resin.

Engaging in the creation of transparent works, Kratohvil built on his previous rich and diverse artistic experience, while at the same time boldly experimenting, he discovered new possibilities of sculpture. By creating a volume filled with mass, transparency fully accessible to the eye from outside and inside, the artist opened up new problematic challenges in sculpture. The property of transparency allowed light to enter the interior of the mass of the sculpture. During the creative act, the artist was able to control the level of transparency through the method of production and thus additionally influence the visual properties of the work itself. And more than that, after the completion of the sculpture, by positioning it in relation to the light source, the visual characteristics of the object could be controlled and changed. The position of the light source in relation to the sculpture, i.e. the angle at which the light falls, refracts and passes through the work, the type of light and its intensity are new significant parameters that in this case have become relevant for the overall appearance of the sculpture. Just as a few decades ago, space became an integral part of form in sculpture along with mass, so characteristic of these works by Kratochvil, now light has also become its building factor.

Polyester began to be sporadically used in sculpture in the 1960s. In Yugoslav and Serbian artistic circles, Kratohvil was certainly among the pioneers. However, the acceptance of polyester by the professional and cultural public as a sculptural material was not without skepticism. Plastic mass, among noble materials like stone, marble or wood, seemed to have no place. Some of his contemporaries believed that by using polyester, Kratovil reached for easy solutions in sculpture. Observing these works, the uninitiated remains in doubt as to whether the airy sculptures were created out of breath or are the result of long deliberation, a lot of work and failed attempts. The first assumption about a quick and easy solution stems from the visual harmony, the refined composition and the emphasized beauty that the artist most certainly strove for in his most mature years. They are made in such a way that they appear simple, yet sending a discreet provocation to the observer for questioning about the way of their origin. Understanding the newly discovered technology of work, it becomes clear that these sculptures were created gradually, even evolutionarily, from the artist's decades of work experience, from his raised and developed visual culture.

Creating transparent sculptures in the silence of his studio for several years, Jovan Kratohvil exhibited them only once within his last solo exhibition in the Gallery of the Cultural Center of Belgrade in 1983. With the exception of the affirmative introductory text by Živojin Turinski in the accompanying catalog and the same article in "Politica", where, noting the maturity of Kratohvil's artistic expression, he concludes that "everything he intended, he managed to realize", it seems that the reception of these works in the professional and wider cultural was absent from the public, which was in complete contrast to his earlier exhibition practice.

photo: from the documentation of the Kratohvil family

The fact that almost all the works remained in his possession after the exhibition speaks for the fact that Kratohvil's transparent polyesters were not well received. With the exception of one sculpture, they were not part of government purchases like his older works in stone, bronze, brass and iron. After that, the artist almost stopped exhibiting, and in 1989, after his retirement, due to poor health, he completely withdrew from public life. Only in 1996, the National Museum of Serbia was the first museum to purchase an exceptional banner directly from the artist Composition of MVD 3/78 which today, except for the current exhibition, is in a permanent museum display.

Current, Kratohvil's only retrospective exhibition Composition 100/24 it was organized on the occasion of marking the hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth in the National Museum of Serbia as a unique opportunity to view forty years of diverse artistic oeuvre, which is crowned with transparent works in polyester, and as an opportunity to revalue his artistic legacy. At the official opening of the exhibition on November 15, 2024, the artist's airy sculptures shone, providing many visitors with the opportunity to get acquainted with all of them, as well as these, his most innovative creations.