Balažević Ivan – Deeply Shallow

He was born in 1949 in Tavankut. He graduated in 1968 from GTŠC in Subotica, department of architecture. He graduated in 1997 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Prof. Marijan Detoni. Since 1985, he has held the status of a freelance artist. He is a member of the Croatian Association of Freelance Artists, the Croatian Association of Visual Artists, Rijeka branch, and the Association of Applied Arts Artists of Croatia. He has exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions. He is a laureate of significant awards (e.g., award for graphics at the ALU student exhibition, award for tapestry in Kawasaki, Annual HDLUR Award, City of Rijeka Award for contribution to the visual arts life of Rijeka, City of Novi Vinodolski Award for visual contribution to the city, and many others). He lives and works in Novi Vinodolski.

“Painter Ivan Balažević has, over past decades, defined his position in the contemporary Croatian scene. This position can be understood through the artist’s versatile interest realized in various visual techniques and media, and certainly, through the aesthetic principles decisively promoted in his personal interpretation… And the true basis of this creation is recognized not only through numerous methods and different visual means with which he paints a surface with a brush, or ‘draws’ it with its sharpened edge, some other tool, expert dripping and splattering of paint… but in the cultivated exploration of this language within the context of postmodernist postulates, writing its possibilities as a password of his expression.” (Milan Bešlić)