The paintings of the forgotten artist, stored for years in one Zagreb attic, will be exhibited in Lauba. Although it sounds like a perfect cliché, this story is actually true. Ljubomir Perčinlić’s exhibition opens on March 25 at 7:00 p.m. and will remain open until April 3 2024.

With a large exhibition of abstract paintings and sculptures by Ljubomir Perčinlić in Lauba, the memory of the forgotten artist is renewed, opening up new areas of research for experts. The exhibition will present Perčinlić’s abstract paintings created during the last almost twenty years of his life. In addition to oil paintings and drawings, sculptures will also be exhibited, and visitors will have the opportunity to see almost fifty of Perčinlić’s works, most of which have not been exhibited before.

Ljubomir Perčinlić, born in 1939 in Zenica, graduated in painting in 1966 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, after which he returned to Zenica and was employed as a professor of art education in a high school. From 1975 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, and in 1992 he moved to Zagreb, where he died on September 7, 1998.

Even in the early sixties, he started to summarize, reduce and synthesize his artistic expression. Starting with interpretations of the Bosnian landscape, exploring natural beauty and romantic historical imagery, Perčinlić searched for a “formula” that would capture the essence of the landscape. Through the gradual reduction of the representation into almost geometrized forms and variations of gentle white, gray and bluish tones, the specific motif became only a distant memory for the painter – an inspiring source without any intention of reconstructing the motif.

In the foreword to the exhibition, Marijan Špoljar points out: “More than a quarter of a century since the departure of Ljubomir Perčinlić, perhaps the time has come for renewed interest in the art of this Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian artist. Everything has been done in his favor a long time ago (numerous exhibitions, texts by the most renowned critics, a valuable book by Marijan Susovski), and it is only up to us not to let this exceptional work fall into oblivion, so that the white, ‘invisible’ images do not evaporate from our collective consciousness .”

Author of the exhibition foreword: Marijan Špoljar

Curator of the exhibition: Marina Šafarić