2023. AIR SHOW, Karlovac City Museums, Museum of the Homeland War Karlovac – Turanj, Karlovac

(…) She has not created the recent collages by combining newspaper cuttings as she did in the first cycle of larger-sized collages, First Letters (1996-1997), but has cut pieces out of publications documenting her past shows, whether they were catalogues, posters, brochures or invitations that she used as material in the cycle Invitations (2005-2007). In these sheets, produced in a printing shop, letters are indispensable and inevitable, for they are cut out of pages with the printed wording of forewords to shows, list of exhibits, or with a reproduction of a given exhibit. Some of the printed sheets are cut out in such a way as to recall the symmetrical silhouettes of planes, and some are cut in irregular geometrical figures that are there as if ground for the schematically cut out forms of planes that with their texture – together with the letters printed on them – provide associations with everything that, on the earthly flatland, is visible at speed from the vertiginous airy heights the planes are flying: like grids of city streets, buildings, various proving grounds, industrial zones and even natural relief.

Unlike other cycles in which she seems to be taking up the theme of time and its appearance in duration, these collages in their dynamic visual composition give us a moment that is already past. The expressive capacities for varying the visual features of surfaces cut with scissors and their colour relations, within Anabel’s already known palette (consisting of achromatic white, black and grey, chromatic red and shades of ivory and ochre) are spiritualised with pondered gestural interventions in black ink or whitener, and the pieces of what was run off on the printing machine are harmoniously enhanced with painterly gesture.

Each composition takes into consideration some other visual relationship. In some the almighty force of gravitation is nullified and the relations of up and down are also abrogated, creating the impression of an illimitable space of flight; in some compositions the silhouette of plane is wittily drawn out with a red or black contour line; in some compositions it is possible to make out fragments of names or words that to those who know the artist’s work will suggest a link to a work already experienced, while those who meet her works for the first time will be offered an enigmatic incentive for the conjuring up of meaning and for further exploration of the artist’s interest horizon.

Antonija Škrtić, The View from Above, foreword in the catalogue of the individual exhibition Anabel Zanze – Air Show, Karlovac City Museums, Museum of the Homeland War Karlovac – Turanj, Karlovac, May 21 – September 5, 2024 (translation: Graham McMaster)