Stjepan Sandrk

Stjepan Sandrk was born in 1984. He graduated painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in 2006. He has exhibited at a number of solo and group exhibitions in the country and abroad.
This young but already renowned artist is recognizable for his realistic painting with frequent scenes depicted from the world of art and portraits of some famous people.
The characters he represents in photographically realistic manner might be conceived as icons but in the sense of popular culture contemporary icons. The point in question in this young artist’s opus is about this hyper realistic painting with scenes created on the basis of the audience photographed in exhibitions halls of different museums and galleries that bring us into the status of the second hand observers, turning us into direct participants of his creative achievement. He has creating paintings representing paintings of other artists with his colleagues standing aside as neutral observers. The artist is telling us about the relationship of an artist toward the art institutions, gives us his opinion who deserves being in the museum, who defines the relationship in regard of painting today, who the visititors in the gallery premises are. The artist is a real master in this achievement giving a distinctive impressions to his reinterpretation that is communicative in the same time, with carefully chosen visual facts recorded by his camera and conveyed on the canvas by the refinement of subtle artistic sensibility.
Stjepan Sandrk lives and works in Zagreb.

Solo Exhibitions (selection)
2017 “Inspiration to classic”, Winarts Gallery, Milan
2016 “Spektakl”, Kontura Gallery, Zagreb
2015  CEART (Centro de Arte Tomas y Valiente), Madrid
2013 “GOLDEN PAINTINGS”, Sebastian Gallery, Dubrovnik
“Pulitika”, Dulcic Gallery, Dubrovnik
2012 “Martina and bulldog”, Mazuth Gallery, Zagreb

Group Exhibitions (selection)
2014 Croatian Association of Artists, biennale
2013 Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, ESSL Award CEE nominees “ New Croatian Realism”
2012 SWAB International Contemporary Art Fair, Barcelona