oil on wood, 123 x 98 cm, signed and dated middle right, in pencil, "NIVES KK (19)75."

The painting "Between Two Flights" already suggests the life and poetic orientation of Croatian painter Nives Kavurić Kurtović through its title alone. She was born in Zagreb in 1938, where she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (under Frane Baće). She also worked in Zagreb until her death in 2016. Despite the fact that her life was geographically quite narrowly defined by this location, her imagination wandered the unexplored and often bizarre regions she mapped with her paintings. We can read them in numerous keys — from surreal humor to anxious grotesque. A joy and pleasure in life, and even in creation, and the defiant eros of everyday, clash, on her canvases, with morbid body metamorphoses. Still, even in this dark view of reality, the artist found a joy of expression that is evident in her figural inventions. These might be the "two flights" referred to in the title of this painting. The presence of fragmented human bodies of female physiognomy, a duplicated face and pastel colors on this painting suggest a lyrical experience of existence. At the same time a strong sense of suffering and its transcendence through biomorphic burgeoning, i.e. through creation and multiplication of life, all things human or corporeal. It is here achieved by association with the actual, evolutionary formation of a living being, perhaps even with a deliberate association with the prenatal development of a fetus. But (and much more importantly) it is shown metaphorically - as an artistic, that is a painterly, creation, where inanimate matter (canvas, paint) becomes a trace of the artist's experiencing of reality, and thus a testimony of her life and the separate life of a new work of art. FG

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