MIROSLAV ŠUTEJ: VISUAL EXERCISE
July 2025 - September 2025
Aura Space,
Braga, PT
*Curated by Lucija and Silvija Šutej.
All images copyright and courtesy @Foundation Šutej
Searching was the verb that defined the work of Miroslav Šutej. An important figure in the formation of a new visual language in Croatia and a member of the international Op Art Movement, he came to prominence through The Responsive Eye exhibition at MoMA. His work challenged sight, and has pushed the boundaries of perception - from the Bombardment of the Optic Nerve to Bum-Bum (Boom-Boom), optical friction played with the viewer’s perception.
The static nature of prints is through Šutej’s hands reimagined through the presentation and implementation of modular graphics - inviting the audience to rotate the work’s segments, adding new identities. Each motion added a new layer to the work and enabled the audience to actively play and redefine prints in their own parameters.
Throughout the years, Šutej assembled numerous artists’ folders dedicated to print such as the Chaos (Kaos) - however the basis of his work lies in the dynamic set of style exercises in the medium of drawings—where research, (re)imagination and transformation of the organic world was via paper applied through the lens of technology and mechanics. From 1963, Šutej’s interest in science grew and he gradually started collecting science-related books. We can often find names of his works borrowed from different publications' titles. As described by his wife: “Science was for Miroslav a play as opposed to a system”. Through his eyes, garments were reimagined in the context of antifashion, while he treated the subject of erotica through illusion—where allusions were drawn though nature, furniture, travelling from prints to sculpture.
With the cycle Hands, we are delighted to share Šutej’s aptitude for the mediums of sketch and drawing. Since the 1970s, through lines, texture and colour, the artist pushed the anatomical motif and medium’s boundaries to the very limit. The free and rapid exercises in mark-making were treated as careful studies of the organic world re-applied through the method of modularity. In the imagination of the artist the anatomy of a hand is revisioned as a play of motion, geometry, colour and ultimately emerges in the context of robotics.
Šutej’s playful ability to challenge the boundaries of material, of interest towards application of imagination to technology, also reveals the depth of his imagination - the layering, repetition, rotation, and colour pallete — reveal the new dynamic system of the approaches and views of the subject at hand. What we witness is reverse engineering.
In 1980, the Hands print folder was produced counting 8 prints. We see the clear influence of the autonomous experiment of the earlier sketches which laid a fruitful foundation for the prints. Further, it is revealed to us that sketches were the primary interest of his work, a vital tool of “free” thinking. Spontaneous and quick plays of hand, drawings were the spaces where the artist would address the essence of his subject and enabled us a clear insight into his imagination - an exercise of associations, and metamorphosis. Where the motif of hands is through the cycle addressed, deconstructed and readdressed.
In the times of AI and the conversations of the implementation of technology on clothes and body, Šutej’s imagination as seen through the drawings reimagined not only the structure of the hands anatomy but also the possibility of capabilities and options of mechanics integration. As we trace through the series - Šutej’s thanks are extended to the capabilities of hands to reimagine and reframe our world.
Miroslav Šutej (1936-2005) was born in Duga Resa, Croatia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and trained under Krsto Hegedušić. His early career breakthrough came with the 1st Prize at the 2nd Zagreb Exhibition of Yugoslav Graphics, followed by international recognition, including the Grand Prix for Painting at the 1963 Paris Biennale and the 1st Prize at the 1968 Tokyo International Biennale of Graphics. Other major awards include the Honorary Prize at New Delhi’s 2nd International Triennale of India (1971), the Premio International do Gravura at the São Paulo Biennale (1971) and more.
In collaboration with Venetian gallerist Paolo Cardazzo, Šutej co-founded the Motovun Art Encounters, an influential summer residency in Istria that hosted artists such as Marina Abramović, Ulay, Goran Trbuljak, and Dora Maurer.
Šutej exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Key exhibitions include Graphik 63 at Vienna’s Albertina Museum (1963), Nuova Tendenza 2 at Venice’s Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1963), The Exhibition of Contemporary Prints in Yugoslavia at Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art (1965), The Responsive Eye at New York’s MoMA (1965, with subsequent shows in Baltimore and Seattle), The Contemporary Yugoslav Sculpture at London’s Hayward Gallery (1970), Biennale de Gravure at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne (1970), Tokyo’s Biennial Exhibition of Prints (1972), XXXVI Venice Biennale – Grafica d’Oggi at Ca’ Pesaro (1972), Arte Yugoslava Contemporanea in Lisbon (1979), and The 7th Seoul International Print Biennale (1990), and more.
His works are held in MoMA and the Guggenheim (New York), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Modern (London), Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), Städtisches Museum (Leverkusen), Kunsthalle Bremen, National Museum (Warsaw), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and (previously Bridgestone) Artizon Museum of Art (Tokyo), among others.
