7. IV – 12. V. 2011 / Curator: Vlastimir Kusik / Set up: Vlastimir Kusik, Anabel Zanze, Igor Zidić / Photo: Danijel Zec
(…) The painterly morphology in which word and image make up a relationship between the visual and the textual or, rather, an investigation of the intra-pictorial and the intra-textual in contemporary art is one of the major features of that art in the wake of the historical avant-gardes, the neo-avant-garde and the post-avant-garde. In his Concepts of Contemporary Art, Miško Šuvaković lists ten levels or platforms of this relationship on the historical line of contemporary art referred to. From the direction of this line of development towards the directions of a number of collective and also individual kinds of art practice it would branch out towards just as many more trends, giving rise to the formation of, perhaps, one of the richest and most intricate genealogical trees in the morphology of contemporary art. By this is meant, of course, the lines of development from the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s via the neo-avant-garde movement of the seventies to the post-modernist practices of the present day.
The painting of Anabel Zanze is certainly heir to some of these artistic practices, which is, of course, entirely normal and intelligible, considering that this really is one of the dominant and most influential trends in contemporary art. But it would be a mistake at once, a priori and as a matter of course, to state that we are dealing here with painting that was created by way of a combination or compilation of several of these practices, a kind of painterly experiment with some of their characteristics. These are perhaps discernible in the productions of this painter, but quite surely this was not the path on which she set out in order to arrive at such a result. Instead of any such experiment, she drew on her own experience in the quest for her own painterly being. (…)
(…) This painterly extremely parsimonious expression touched on many minimalists, conceptualists and post-conceptualists, but never internalised a single one of them to the full, made none of them dominant. The painting that we are considering ostensibly resorts to many of the stylistic sequences and individuals, to whom it really does tip its cap, in a collage with the likeness of Beuys; and yet, Anabel Zanze has cleared the way to her own “painting now” with her own forces, will and choice. (…)