Manuela Vladić Maštruko has been present on the Croatian art scene for many years, most of all as the illustrator of picture books and books for children. As a painter and a conceptual artist formed in the generation of professor Kulmer, she has built her personal and peculiar artistic world around a fine core of child’s soul. Manuela Vladić Maštruko uses the experience of childhood, this parallel space-time in which everything is imbued with each other and everything is possible and always new, as a source of inspiration for her work. Being a mother herself, she has the opportunity to experience cyclic changes of life and to conceive her own and other people’s childhoods through experience of an adult person. To see the world through the eyes of a child means to see it always new, not because the world is new (on the contrary – it is “old” in a comforting way); a child is the one who grows, develops and changes, being “always new”. Children’s world spreads in concentric circles around the archetypal, primordial in self and in the surrounding world, collecting and twirling images and notions, events and feelings into one indivisible unit… to the day when a child grows up and imagination and reality must set apart. Only artists are allowed to remain children, especially when their creativity is in question.
If childhood is a symbolic paradise island in the sea of rough reality we all have to leave one day, Manuela Vladić Maštruko suggests, through her new exhibition under the title “Island of Childhood”, that we can always return to this island, at least for a short time. A central part of the exhibition is given to paintings from the cycle “The Sea Dream” which are more than illustrations for her new picture book having the same title. Every small acrylic painting on canvas is at the same time a part of the story we might know and presents a painting for itself, artistically integral and self-sufficient. Recognizably surfaced construction of space almost as in collage, rich colourism and stylized forms are even more revealed on large canvases, geometrism of which is close to abstraction. What makes the exhibition “Island of childhood” particularly interesting are installations made of deposited matter, i. e. of wood washed ashore by the sea on which the author paints motives of fishes and ships, giving wood a new life.
“Island of childhood” is an imaginary place, it cannot be found on nautical charts, but it still exists. Ask children, they know where it is and how to get there. Or ask Manuela Vladić Maštruko. She lives on it.