Tomislav Toma Kauzlarić

Kauzlarić attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, and he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, having completed a specalized course in 1965. He staged solo exhibitions in the Gallery of the Kolarac People’s University in 1967, in the Youth Center Gallery in 1968, in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1973, and in the Cultural Center Gallery in 1979, all in Belgrade. He participated in the Contemporary Yugoslav Art exhibition in Prague in 1969, London 1970, Athens 1976, Manila 1979, in the Yugoslav Selection at the Belgrade ’80 exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. He had a retrospective as a part of the 35th October Salon in the ULUS Gallery in 1984.

In contemporary Serbian art, Kauzlarić was the only representative of a discipline called sculpture-object introduced to the Yugoslav art scene at the Object and Color exhibition in the Centar Gallery in Zagreb in 1968, and in the Objects section at the IV Triennale in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 1970. In a detailed elaboration, in a monograph with an introduction by Balša Rajčević, Kauzlarić’s oeuvre was divided into following chapters: Sculpture Inspired by Usable Items, Objects, Objects – Alterable Forms, 1972-1973, and Exploring Newsprint Paper 1973-1979.

In his development, Kauzlarić passed through stages ranging from that of a sculptor of a classic formatory method to “a plastician of a new sensibility in contemporary industrial and antisculptural method“ such as colored wood, plexiglas-yuvidur [PVC] plastic, eloxed aluminum, and, especially, as his important and original operative technique, the use of newsprint paper, with which, as it was written in the said mongraph, achieved “a transformation of an ephemeral and one of the most banal most widespread materials in everyday use into a new esthetic form“.