Goran Trbuljak: Before and After Retrospective
– monograph
(May 2018)


Trbuljak belongs to the generation of artists from former Yugoslavia who explored varied means of overcoming the modernist tradition, known as the New Art Practice. In comparison to many of his contemporaries in Zagreb and around the world, whose conceptual art practices continued in the spirit of late modernism by exalting the artist and the aura of the artwork, Trbuljak’s strategy was, nevertheless, notably distinctive. With his modest, self-effacing, unpretentious, and intimate works he exposed the inner conflict he experienced as an artist and embraced the paradox of art’s self-negating tactics by persistently exploring and probing the margins between art and anti-art, the artist and the non-artist.

At the height of the conceptual art movement, some 50 years ago, Trbuljak explored the role of the artist in satirical, often melancholic works that took his own weaknesses as their creative starting-point and established him as a forerunner of the postmodern sensibility.

Read more: e-flux

Publisher: gurgur editions, Berlin
Language: English
Edited by: Tevž Logar
Pages: 328
ISBN: 978-961-91531-9-2