For someone known for his tongue in cheek celebration of the laziness of the East European artist, the abundance of drawings, photos, videos and paintings in this major retrospective of the work of Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović does not exactly suggest idleness. The show lays out the full range of the artist’s prodigious output - from his experimental phase in the early 70s, to membership of the rebellious Group of Six in Zagreb, and from characteristic post-Tito works exploring the decay of communist ideology in the 1980s, to his emotive response to the trauma of the Balkan War. What shines through Stilinović’s conceptual reflections on the changing social and political contexts of the last four decades is his unique sense of humour, which greets the visitor in the form of a cream cake suspended from the ceiling, while a witty frog croaks the art world’s favourite banal compliment, ‘great show, great show!’, on the way out.

Back in the early 70s, Stilinović developed his fascination with language and experimented with the manipulation of visual signs through collages, and the show offers insight into the roots of his practice in the analysis of the interaction of linguistic and visual signs, ranging from poetic speech to the semiotics of political sloganeering. He used the medium of the artist’s book to work on increasingly political topics - which in the context of communist Yugoslavia were also elements of the everyday public sphere - such as the notions of work, production or the victory of the working class. Looking beyond their face-value content, Stilinović is interested in how these building blocks of political discourse function on the level of metaphors or symbols, including, for example, the way that colours are mobilised for ideological purposes, particularly the use of revolutionary red by communist regimes - which over time faded into post-political pink.

Stilinović was also a member - along with his brother Sven and a group of artist friends - in the Group of Six, who collectively rocked the Croatian art world in the late 70s. While this exhibition understandable puts the stress on his individual artistic career, the provocative public actions carried out by the group also left an indelible mark on the local art scene. Stilinović’s best known work from the 1980s is probably the Exploitation of the Dead, which is an umbrella title for a collection of hundreds of pieces that explore the ‘dead signs’ of communist ideology, from the Russian avant-garde to socialist realism, by repainting and ‘exploiting’ them. The work is installed on both the outside and inside of a walled enclosure right at the centre of the gallery, perhaps to suggest that these painted signs can be read both as literally leading to a dead end, and as simultaneously opening out to new interpretations through their contemporary display.       

The 1990s in the former Yugoslavia were summed up by the artist in a single word, ‘Bol’, or pain, which he famously repeated ad infinitum as a series of thousands of amended dictionary entries at the Venice Biennial, a work also on show in the Ludwig. Along with pain, money is a recurrent theme for Stilinović, including here a visualisation through millions of sheets of graph paper piled up on the floor of the uneven distribution of global wealth. Also on a financial note, ‘Sing!’ - one of his signature pieces that also provides the title for the exhibition - shows the artist with a banknote pasted on his forehead and refers ironically to the position of an artist exposed to the power relations of society. The work, which at the time it was realised in 1980 could be seen as a critical comment about the status of the artist in state-run Yugoslavia, today also speaks about the role of artists in a global scene dominated by new political and economic agendas.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes