Exhibition of Josip Vaništa, April - June 2013, MCA Zagreb, curator Nada Beroš

As a consequence of an accidental ‘Freudian slip’ in the electronic mail between the artist Josip Vaništa and Nada Beroš, the curator of his exhibition in MSU (The Museum of Contemporary Art) in Zagreb, the exhibition ‘Abolition of Retrospective’ got its name, which would later, quite unintentionally, prove to be a very apt name for the ‘abolition of retrospective’ by both actors in this planned and realized enterprise. Vaništa’s exhibition was not initially devised as a standard museum retrospective that considers the artist’s opus in time sequences of various periods, but, according to the exhibition and its publication, the artist’s legacy is represented with individual thematic areas that break the strict chronology and division of the opus into phases and typologies of the pre-Gorgona, Gorgona and post-Gorgona periods.

Thus, the frequent division of the ‘two-key’ interpretation, in some interpretations of Vaništa’s seemingly contradictory artistic production, was suppressed and almost cancelled. The idea of the ‘two Vaništas’ was questioned, the one outside Gorgona and the one inside Gorgona, in order to finally blend everything the artist created into a single whole, undoubtedly his own in which all the parts are equal particles of a single, quite personal ‘integral artwork’ – from the earliest paintings and drawings to the recent creations in various methods.