Death in Korkyra (1/4)
15–29 May 2026 – Centre for Culture Korčula
7 July – 20 September 2026 – Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb
17 July – 17 August 2026 – Wi-Fi Gallery Siva (zona)
17 July – 17 August 2026 – Korčula Town Museum
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the death of the artist Željko Jerman (Zagreb, 10 March 1949 – Korčula, 17 July 2006), and 20 years of activity of the Grey Area, that launched its gallery program on 24 July 2007, an exhibition project is being realized that simultaneously marks two significant continuities – Jerman’s artistic legacy and two decades of work by a platform dedicated to contemporary art. The project is also part of a series of exhibitions organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art presenting works from the museum’s collection.
The exhibition takes place across four venues in Korčula and Zagreb, bringing together works from the MSU collection, the Bojana Švertasek Collection, as well as extensive archival materials and photo documentation. The curatorial concept is grounded in the work Death in Corkyra, whose title symbolically evokes Jerman’s creative and existential context connected to the island of Korčula. It was precisely there that the artist realized a number of key projects and exhibitions – from the mosaic in Potirna (1981), now on permanent display in Vela Luka, to the solo exhibitions Korčula, My Working Town (ACI Marina Korčula and Centre for Culture Vela Luka, 1995) and In the Tavern Time Works (Centre for Culture Vela Luka, 2003).
An important place within this sequence is held by the exhibition Korkyra on My Mind (Korčula in My Memory), presented in 1994 at Gallery PM, HDLU, Zagreb, which further consolidated the relationship between the island setting and the artist’s conceptual reflection on the media of photography, text, and personal narration.
The exhibition program also includes a reconsideration of Ivan Faktor’s project Željko Jerman – My Month (2005), previously presented within the Siva zona program. Jerman’s work My Month, on which Faktor’s video was based, will be presented in August 2026.
This multi-venue project affirms Jerman’s role as one of the key figures of the Croatian conceptual art scene, highlighting the specific interconnection between artistic practice, place, and memory, while confirming the continuity of institutional and independent collaboration in the presentation and reinterpretation of museum collections.
About author
Željko Jerman (Zagreb, 10 March 1949 – Korčula, 17 July 2006) was a Croatian contemporary artist and essayist, and one of the key protagonists of conceptual art in Croatia during the 1970s. After discontinuing his formal education in 1967, he devoted himself to photography, completed a photography course, and passed the exams required to run an independent studio. In 1970, he opened the photographic atelier Blow Up in Zagreb, and from 1972 to 1974 he studied photography by correspondence (FPS – Famous Photography School).
From the early 1970s onward, he radically reexamined the medium of photography, focusing on its technical and chemical properties. Rejecting the conventions of aesthetically “successful” photography, he deliberately produced blurred and “bad,” materially emphasized works, intervening directly in photographic paper with developer, scratching, tearing, and burning. In 1974, he initiated the cycle of elementary photography, reduced to the direct application of photochemicals onto paper without the use of a camera (Krepaj fotografijo!, 1974). His works from this period are strongly marked by processuality and existential intensity.
From 1975, he was active within the Group of Six Authors, with whom he carried out actions and exhibitions in public spaces. In the work My Year (1977), he encapsulated his artistic and personal positions of that time. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, he developed multimedia approaches, incorporated text into his works, and intensively produced cycles of photo-paintings, which remained a constant in his oeuvre until the end of his life.
He was also active as a writer and critic, publishing in Polet, Studentski list, Danas, Studio, Oko, Jutarnji list, and Zarez. In 2006, his book Lost Portraits (Zagubljeni portreti) was published, and he continued writing his column Egotrip until the final days of his life.
