Mihael Klanjčić, Parallel Situations
It is our pleasure to invite you at the opening of the exhibition by Mihael Klanjčić Parallel Situations on Tuesday 24th June 2025 at 9 pm. The exhibition is open until 18th July 2025.
Kravata Gallery, Jelsa
Curator: Dominik Duboković
Photo: Šimun Bućan
If I tell everything, the work dies. With this sentence, the artist emphasizes the importance of open interpretation; therefore, each work by Mihael Klanjčić can be seen not as a statement, but as a possibility. His objects act as quiet distortions of everyday life – fragile, displaced, and inscribed into duration. Each artistic object opens a micro-narrative, which does not seek linearity, but invites to free interpretation and imaginative possibility. The artist does not offer conclusions, but leaves behind traces. Klanjčić’s process, based on time and contemplation, is characterized by openness to chance, calmness of gesture, and absence of final answers. He finds objects, keeps them, reflects on them, and then intervenes – always thoughtfully, but never fully closed. The works emerge slowly, in contact with time and life; they are driven by sentences, memories, found forms – all that cannot be planned in advance.
In Klanjčić’s recent works, the viewer encounters a series of objects that elude clear narrative, but not meaning. The artist sets up four situations – four objects – in a space that is not conceived as a unified whole, but as a collection of parallel worlds that can be observed either in isolation or together. By using materials such as plexiglass, wood, aluminium, and ceramics, the artist establishes a poetics of the everyday. He does not impose meaning on materials – he shifts them, transforms them, moves them from their original axis. His interventions are never loud or pretentious, but very quiet and subtle. Through gestures of displacement, relocation, and the gentle emphasis on existing tensions, he invites the viewer to approach the work not as a finished artifact, but as an open situation, a mental space where the figurative and the abstract overlap. In these parallel situations, each work becomes a space of interpretive possibility.
The artistic practice of Mihael Klanjčić is not internal but external. He does not speak out loud, but whispers. In his work, the viewer does not seek a message, but their own rhythm of looking. What seems mundane – a lamp, a shelf, a hook, a ladder step – is transformed through artistic gesture into a spatial reflection on time, presence, and change. In this context, Parallel Situations is not an exhibition of objects to be perceived as finished entities, but a space of encounter, where the works become what they are through the experience of viewing.
Dominik Duboković
Mihael Klanjčić (b. 1994 in Zagreb) graduated in 2019 from the Art Education Department at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb (with specialization in painting), in the class of Professor Damir Sokić. He has held seven solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 37th Youth Salon (HDLU Centre), The Life of Finely Tuned Forms (KiBela, Kranjčar Gallery), 57th Zagreb Salon (Dom HDLU), 35th Youth Salon (HDLU Centre), 16th Erste Fragments (Lauba), and Art is Doubt (LEXART Depot). He received the Radoslav Putar Award in 2023. He lives and works in Zagreb.
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the Jelsa Municipality.