The Music of Our Youth / Zlatko Cvetković

Zlatko  Cvetković is an artist who with authenticity, with lucidity, and often with humour, creates installations in merging together of textile techniques and technologies with objects of the popular culture. With the exhibition The Music of Our Youth, he continues his research into the phenomena of ephemerality and oblivion. In order to express associative and emotional values of music, Cvetković experiments with records, audio-video cassettes and CDs. In his creations, just like in our everyday lives, they lose their function and purpose, and become the material for knitting, chrocheting, embroidery, sewing through, gluing together (papier mâché) and for video art formations. The eight exhibited works and their titles (Long Play, New Wave, No More Shiny Disco Balls, Disco, Madonna, …) surprise viewer and offer joy of recognition of his/her own life- and music experiences.

„If we abide in memory, everything that we inherit, that we experience, or remember, abides in us, even the traces of things we cast aside. How conscious are we of ourselves, of our pathways and of the signposts that help us orient ourselves in the webs of (non)sense, of memory that enriches us, but at the same time burdens us heavily? Digging down into his own past and subconsciousness and placing various remains of the past civilization in new contexts, as elements of his artworks, Zlatko Cvetković introduces multiple meanings, and affirms new realities of works of art, into complex structures that are based on his reflections on the multilayered and fallacious image of reality, working, to be specific, in the field of contemporary art fabric. Cvetković masters new expressive modes while developing the introspective process of projection and elaboration of specific subjects, and expanding the capacities of his basic medium. This is what he does moving from one project to another, serving as an impressive representative of the contemporary scene of both applied and visual arts, in general, which turns toward global problems of the contemporary man and society, of the contemporary industry, technology, of tradition, nature, of the contemporary culture and media sphere.“

Ljubica Jelisavac Katić,
an extract from the text in the Catalogue of the Exhibition

Biography:

Zlatko Cvetković (1971) graduated from Faculty of Applied Arts, Belgrade, at Department of Textile Design (1996). He has been working at the Faculty since 1997, from which he earned his MA degree in Textile, under mentorship of Prof. Jadranka Simonović (2001). He is member of art group LUM (Lavatorium of Artistic Thoughts) (1996–1998), of Punkt for Artistic Experiment (1999–2001), of European Textile Network (since 2007), and of ULUPUDS (Association of Applied Arts Artists and Designers of Serbia, since 1997).

Zlatko Cvetković exhibits regularly in the country and abroad, ever since 1995. He won numerous prizes and awards for his artworks, which are featured in the collections of Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade, Studio 61 in Novi Sad, and of Museum of Applied Arts in Riga (Latvia).

More detailed biography of the artists can be found at:
www.fpu.bg.ac.rs/nastavnici/Nastavnici/ZlatkoCvetkovic/inde