Vlado Kristl
07 - 16 Nov 2014
Vlado Kristl
Don Kihot / Don Quixote 1961
film still
Courtesy Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Archives
Don Kihot / Don Quixote 1961
film still
Courtesy Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Archives
VLADO KRISTL
Death to the Audience
7 – 16 November 2014
Curated by George Clark
Vlado Kristl (1923–2004) was an iconoclastic and divisive figure who produced a remarkable range of work from pioneering animations and experimental films to poetry, performances and painting. A founding member of the EXAT ‘51 art group in Zagreb in 1950s, Kristl left Croatia in 1962 after his early film The General 1962 was banned. Relocated in Germany, he created a unique body of work in the context of post-war European cinema.
To accompany the retrospective Vlado Kristl: Death to the Audience at Tate Modern, the most extensive presentation of his films in the UK to date, this display in the Starr Foyer brings together a selection of Kristl’s artists’ books, poetry anthologies and exhibition catalogues spanning 1969–2003 that he created and published throughout his life. The range of Kristl’s work across media and his constant revision and reframing of his work in his publications makes explicit the radical restless energy that coloured his practice throughout his life, from early films awarded at the Oberhausen film festival such as the joyous Madeleine, Madeleine 1963 and Arme Leaute 1963 to his last video work, Weltkongress der Obdachlosen / Conference of the Homeless completed in 2003.
During World War II Kristl worked together with agitprop groups creating posters, flyers, illustrations and cartoons. As a member of EXAT ‘51, Kristl exhibited with Ivan Picelj, Aleksandar Srnec and Bozidar Rasica, at the first exhibition of abstract art in Yugoslavia at the Croatian Association of Architects in Zagreb, 1953. Starting a cycle of creation and destruction that coloured his life, in the late 1950s Kristl rejected the rigid geometry of his EXAT ‘51 period, and sought to re-affirm the materiality of painting and began working with film. At the renowned Zagreb Film animation studio Kristl quickly distinguished himself with his formally radical animations. Original artwork from his early masterpiece Don Kihot / Don Quixote 1961, an inspired adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, is featured in the display.
While teaching at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts (HfbK) Kristl began regularly publishing his poetry in a series of books sold, no matter the number of pages, for 1 Deutsche Mark, ranging from the 8 page booklet Als man noch aus persönlichen Gründen gelebt hat / When People Were Still Living for Personal Reasons published in 1986 (whose name was reused in a film from 1993), to the 265 page book Revolution 1941 – 1980 published in 1984. Across Kristls’ work from his paintings to animated films, his lines dart and scribble against flattered planes; forms are created and then torn apart. Often blending live action with his drawings and text, Kristl’s body of hybrid works exist between media, challenging the limits of each.
Vlado Kristl was born in 1923 in Zagreb, Croatia and died in 2004 in Munich, Germany.
Vlado Kristl: Death to the Audience is organised with additional support from the Goethe-Institut London and in collaboration with the Munich Film Museum
Death to the Audience
7 – 16 November 2014
Curated by George Clark
Vlado Kristl (1923–2004) was an iconoclastic and divisive figure who produced a remarkable range of work from pioneering animations and experimental films to poetry, performances and painting. A founding member of the EXAT ‘51 art group in Zagreb in 1950s, Kristl left Croatia in 1962 after his early film The General 1962 was banned. Relocated in Germany, he created a unique body of work in the context of post-war European cinema.
To accompany the retrospective Vlado Kristl: Death to the Audience at Tate Modern, the most extensive presentation of his films in the UK to date, this display in the Starr Foyer brings together a selection of Kristl’s artists’ books, poetry anthologies and exhibition catalogues spanning 1969–2003 that he created and published throughout his life. The range of Kristl’s work across media and his constant revision and reframing of his work in his publications makes explicit the radical restless energy that coloured his practice throughout his life, from early films awarded at the Oberhausen film festival such as the joyous Madeleine, Madeleine 1963 and Arme Leaute 1963 to his last video work, Weltkongress der Obdachlosen / Conference of the Homeless completed in 2003.
During World War II Kristl worked together with agitprop groups creating posters, flyers, illustrations and cartoons. As a member of EXAT ‘51, Kristl exhibited with Ivan Picelj, Aleksandar Srnec and Bozidar Rasica, at the first exhibition of abstract art in Yugoslavia at the Croatian Association of Architects in Zagreb, 1953. Starting a cycle of creation and destruction that coloured his life, in the late 1950s Kristl rejected the rigid geometry of his EXAT ‘51 period, and sought to re-affirm the materiality of painting and began working with film. At the renowned Zagreb Film animation studio Kristl quickly distinguished himself with his formally radical animations. Original artwork from his early masterpiece Don Kihot / Don Quixote 1961, an inspired adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, is featured in the display.
While teaching at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts (HfbK) Kristl began regularly publishing his poetry in a series of books sold, no matter the number of pages, for 1 Deutsche Mark, ranging from the 8 page booklet Als man noch aus persönlichen Gründen gelebt hat / When People Were Still Living for Personal Reasons published in 1986 (whose name was reused in a film from 1993), to the 265 page book Revolution 1941 – 1980 published in 1984. Across Kristls’ work from his paintings to animated films, his lines dart and scribble against flattered planes; forms are created and then torn apart. Often blending live action with his drawings and text, Kristl’s body of hybrid works exist between media, challenging the limits of each.
Vlado Kristl was born in 1923 in Zagreb, Croatia and died in 2004 in Munich, Germany.
Vlado Kristl: Death to the Audience is organised with additional support from the Goethe-Institut London and in collaboration with the Munich Film Museum