Crveno - Roza
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- Red - Pink
- Crveno - Roza
- 1973-1981
- mixed media, 97 pieces, variable dimensions
The work of Mladen Stilinović, one of the most vivacious proponents of present-day conceptual art, is brilliantly represented by his room installations such as "Red-Pink." This work consists of ninety separate pieces – including photos, drawings, writings, collages and objects – created between 1973 and 1983. Not only are the works small in dimension, they are done on simple supports using simple materials and techniques that are at issue here. Also involved is a genuine embodiment of the principle anti-monumentality, a worldview that informs Stilinović’s life and art. “Poor” materials and handmade work reflect at one and the same time the needs of the artist and his personal predilection under the conditions of late-socialist production and consumption, essentially different in this from kindred artistic poetics in the West during the same years. The topic of the installation "Red-Pink," which is very much one with tautological 1970s, are the two colors, red and pink, and the manipulation of these two colors and the signs that they sublimate. Tautology and ideology interest Stilinović, above all if they can be connected up with humor. And so it is not uncommon for red to be found combined with blue and white, the colors of the national flag, and also on the artist’s underwear, simulating sporty stripe, and on his sexual organ as well. Urging the de-symbolization of red, the sacred color of Communism, Stilinović’s interventions sometimes transformed it into the light-minded and watered-down version of red-pink. And while he systematically dethrones red, the reverse happens with pink, Here, he elegantly puts a color out of favour in the age of Modernism back in the rather stagnant aesthetic system, mocking its rigidity and orthodoxy. N.B.