20. 07. – 31. 07. 2002.

 

The first and most basic question that must inevitably arise out of looking at the hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings of Nives Kavurić Kurtović is: what is the source of such an obsession with anthropomorphic, or with human, mainly female, figures, often exhibiting powerful, in fact grotesque, deformations of the anatomy and the epidermis? Is this a matter of physical suffering of any and all kinds and the pain of gradual decay and dilapidation? We know that moral poverty is greater and more sever  than the physical variety, for people have so often learned to live with contracted hearts, downcast looks, almost without hope or a trace of consolation. Talks with people allow us to see, or guess at, how much suffering, anxiety and fear there is. Thus man is an alien, in the deeper sense of the word. People, their works and words, are the mere shadow of a subject in the eye of the sun. But Nives has no fear of invisible worlds. She captures them in and through her art. She seeks the essence of existence, aware that human beings float on anguish, between what they perhaps were once. what they are no longer, and what they cannot and should not become.