An exhibition by Tomislav Zovka opened at the Kaštela City Museum last night. He presented his narrative cycle Transgressus, which raises the fundamental question of what came before and where it all began. The exhibition will be open until January 11, 2026.
Tomislav Zovko is a visual artist who lives and works in Široki Brijeg. He graduated from the Fra Dominik Mandić General High School in 2005, and in 2012 he received his master's degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Široki Brijeg in the class of Professor Ante Kajinić. He has participated in around thirty art colonies and symposia and has exhibited at more than a hundred group exhibitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad. So far, he has organized eighteen solo exhibitions, among which the cycles Global Siliconization, Transgressus and Siliconology stand out. He is the author of the visual solutions for six HP Mostar postage stamps.
- It's a cycle that I've been doing for a number of years. The first works were created at the end of 2016 and I presented myself with them at some independent group exhibitions. We have 20 works, one part of the cycle is a bit older, a slightly different approach to the works, the other part was actually mostly created this year, so they are, let's say, paintings made in the manner of abstract expressionism, where I actually try to combine the contrast between geometric, sharp or geometrized characters, versus organic, blurred ones, using the dripping technique - said Zovko.
- His works act as visual probes directed towards unexplored parts of the inner and outer universe. Each work opens up the possibility of transition, whether formal, symbolic or ontological, and it is precisely in this possibility that the power of his cycle lies. Transgressus represents not only a transition from one form to another, but also a transition from one consciousness to the next, from one view to another. Zovka's art thus becomes a process of permanent research in which boundaries are not directly destroyed but slowly dissolved. In this process, the observer recognizes his own impulse of search, and therefore this cycle is read as an open space, but also as a personal map of an inner journey - the exhibition description states.
Tomislav Zovko is a member of several professional associations: the Society of Croatian Artists in FBiH (since 2012), the Association of Artists of Bosnia and Herzegovina (since 2013), and the Vrba Association (since 2021). Since 2015, he has been teaching at the College of Arts “Logos Center” in Mostar, where he has been leading the Design Study Program since 2018, and in 2020 he will be granted the permanent title of professor.
His works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Luciano Benetton Collection – Imago Mundi, the Franciscan Museum and Gallery in Široki Brijeg, the Gallery of Queen Katarina Kosača in Mostar, the Museum of Modern Art in Mostar, and other institutions in the region.
He is the recipient of a number of professional awards. In 2016, he won the First Prize for the work "The Weight of Change" at the juried exhibition of the Society of Croatian Fine Artists in FBiH in Mostar. At the First International Biennale of Miniatures Mini MO 2019, he received a Special Jury Award. This is followed by the First Prize for painting at the 22nd Sremsko-Karlova New Year's Art Salon in Serbia in 2020, as well as the Award for the most active member of the Society of Croatian Fine Artists in FBiH in the same year. The most recent recognition is the Annual Award for Painting, awarded to him in 2023 by the Ars Academy from Novi Sad for the exhibition Siliconology.
Photo: Ivana Topic
