18. V – 4. VI. 2014 / Curator: Ivana Janković / Set up: Ivana Janković, Anabel Zanze / Photo: Anabel Zanze
(…) The creative work of Anabel Zanze is in some segments close to the oeuvre of several contemporary artists, among whom we would mention the Austrian artists Jochen Holler, Eva Beierheimer, Miriam Laussegger and Roman Pfeffer. But the kinship with these artists is not so much in the approach or the execution as in the context of engaging with the current theme of the intimate and the collective memory and ultimately of the fear of it being lost. (…) New cycles are along the lines of their predecessors; hiding behind the polysemous semantic strata are interesting personalities to whom Zanze returns in cycles, seeking new formal and conceptual solutions. To this category belong works entitled Book of Writings (2011), Gorgoning I (2012) and Gorgoning II (2013) and, a little later, Reading Kipke I (2014), Reading Kipke II (2014), K. (2014), Square (2014), which can be interpreted as dedications to individual artists or to groups of artists (the Gorgona group, Julije Knifer, Josip Vaništa, Željko Kipke and others), the writings of whom are carefully indited in a font similar to handwritten script. (…)
(…) In Anabel Zanze’s work the use of references should certainly not be interpreted as a mere resort to post-modernist recycling or citationality. These works can be interpreted as an expression of her powerful need for appropriating and saving the individual artistic styles that have been taken over. At the same time, deviating from the usual typographic rules that a given text should be legible, the artist deliberately endeavours to make fluent reading of the text harder, privileging rather the visual impression. And so it is not necessary completely to understand the content; what is important is the impression that comes in its entirety from the understanding of the enforced system of codes and symbols or anti-symbols, associations and ideas that induces consideration and contemplation, without there being any intention of laying metaphysical traps. As result of such a process of labelling image becomes memory of the laid-down experience of our cultural memory, which for the artist represents specific form of mental refuge. In the words of Antun Maračić: „With this kind of behaviour and expression, with a mantra-like method, Anabel seems to be demonstrating her independence”, and yet she also inscribes a powerful steadiness and continuity within the body of the contemporary art scene.