VLADO MARTEK | PREPARATION FOR ART

About

Vlado Martek is a post-conceptual and multimedia artist, poet and writer from Croatia. He was born in Zagreb, where he studied literature and philosophy. According to Dubravka Duric, Martek can be seen as a poet among visual artists and as an artist among poets. The work of Vlado Martek can be seen as avant-garde poetry, or as he himself puts it, “pre-poetry”. Martek has moved towards visual art in order to transcend the limits of language, because according to him, visual language is much more universal. He speaks of himself as a “child of conceptualism”.
 
In the late 1970s he was a member of neo-conceptual Group of Six Artists. In addition to their “exhibition-actions”, they launched the self-published magazine Maj 75.
 
This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Vienna and will focus on poetic experiments and his approach to poetry in visual art. Once Vlado Martek said: “All of poetry can be reduced to the preparations for poetry.” Martek is most interested in the idea that poetry is not a finished, isolated work, but rather comes through the poet, and through the actual conceptualising and writing process. And it’s the same with the art. He is not interested in the work of art as a final product, he presents his ideas in expendable materials, with the stress on the working process.
 
For Martek, the preparation for art is a mannerist custom, and that minimum is always a reflection and expression of preparation. It is built to a certain limit and a certain height. Then you stop; the process is frozen. The preparing cloud keeps all elements together – the preparation lasts. Awareness, insights and activism are collected – all for the body of art. What fails to appear should also not be created (there is a certain excess of shapes). All beauty of preparation is materialised in the fragments.