2011. [FIRST LETTERS], Mazuth Gallery, Zagreb

Do the first pieces by Anabel Zanze in ink on paper, collages and mixed media of 1996 and 1997 depart from her subsequent premises about metier and poetics, or do they just tell of the authenticity of the genesis of her visual idiom? With no doubt, in small formats and small compositions a sensibility is being sought, investigated and found that points at visual minimalism and at the same time with “the decontextualization of known systems” (I. Zidić) of words and letters, Anabel Zanze appears as a kind of unconscious custodian of the cultural heritage, in other words, in the collapse of a culture and a civilisation she salvages, in graphic and painterly terms, concepts from music and literature that have determined a part of her personality as well as our modern epoch generally. (…)

(…) In her art, then, there is none of the intelligent incorporation of meta-narratives, citationality and pastiche that the post-modern fell so in love with, none of the intellectual mockery of the end user of her art. She wants and seeks conversation partners from the other side, wants a subtle answer to the letter, word or line she has sent forth. In this, in one fragment of the sensibility, her drawings resonate with the visual hygiene of Slobodan Vuličević, and the philosophical definition of the radical reduction of the world to the essentials of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos. In addition, as the successor of a very sensitive and yet philosophically firmly founded visual art modernist tradition, Anabel will sometimes withdraw into taciturnity and silence, but this is not an artificially self-enforced silence with which the artist wishes to gain in importance and pseudo-hermeticism from public and reviewers alike, rather it signals the position of a refined observer temporarily withdrawn from the row and racket of the world in order to preserve their own mental and emotional integrity.