Mental Images

"Mental Images" is a cycle of paintings by Miran Šabić made between 2019 and 2024, in oil on canvas and oil on panel. The exhibition was first presented at the Kranjčar Gallery in Zagreb in February 2024, curated by Mladen Lučić, from whose accompanying text the quotation alongside this description is taken. Šabić is known and valued by the public above all as an artist of exceptional printmaking sensibility, yet for some time he has also worked in painting, skilfully adapting his recognisable graphic idiom to the demands of the medium. Iconographically he continues the story that has long occupied him — the relationship between memory, perception and reality. The roots of that theme reach back to his doctoral dissertation "Archiving Memory — On the Border of Life and Death", presented in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017. It was in the archival procedure that Šabić found the inspiration for a mental preservation of objects: he paints his scenes not from life, but from memory. These fragments of recollection are most often the sore points of present-day life — ecological pollution, the decay of industrial and hotel complexes, the violence done to the urban fabric. The human figure is not physically present on these canvases, yet it is everywhere: it is the generator that, through its rash and ill-considered acts, has brought civilisation to the edge of survival. Alienation and absence thus become the unifying themes of the cycle. Through an almost printmakerly way of painting, in which texture subdues the painterly gesture and layered deposits of paint on passages of ground thicken into relief, Šabić accentuates the narrative quality of his surreal scenes. As the artist himself puts it, his paintings are not a document of their time but "a collage of places and objects from my own experience". By subordinating the physical to the mental, Šabić relativises time and space and asks whether reality is real at all. Source: curatorial text by Mladen Lučić for the exhibition "Mental Images", Kranjčar Gallery, Zagreb, 2024.