Heavy Metal

author Oleg Hržić
written by Borivoj Popovčak

 

This article was occasioned by an exhibition of architect and designer Oleg Hržić entitled “Heavy Metal” and shown in the small and intimate space of the gallery “Grubić” in mid-May last year. Hržić filled, or rather, furnished the gallery with his recent works, that is, chairs and a rug. Yet functionally, these objects deserve a better title: sculptures and a painting. Considering Hržić’s entire work, his recent creative turn seems logical. The shapes and colours of his pieces, whether interior design, furniture, stage design, or art fashion, have always been visually accentuated. His philosophy has definitely been influenced by his education in Russia, where he adopted some of the aesthetic principles of Constructivism. He deliberately brings out the visual at the expense of the functional. That the chair, the table, the bed, all these “forms of plastic emotions transposed to space” (Malevich) are sculptures rather than functional objects, was made clear in Hržić’s exhibition in 1985 in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, Croatia. Postmodernism infiltrated the author’s invention, inasmuch as he rephrased various styles and drew references from real life.