Dragana Jurišić Ode to Ivan

Dragana Jurišić has selected three photographs from a long-term ongoing project, Winter Garden (working title). An accompanying text, Ode to Ivan, is inscribed to the renowned Yugoslavian artist Ivan Meštrović (1883-1962), with one of Jurišić’s photographs portraying a marble figurative sculpture by Meštrović. The cleaved arms and despondent expression of the sculpture, as well as the prominence of walls in each of the photographs, exemplify the barriers placed before Jurišić as a woman artist in the patriarchal construct of the art world. The photographs and ideas presented here are the first manifestation of a continuous work-in-progress that is essentially connected to mortality and legacy. The text vividly proclaims that canonical philosophical values cannot communicate the complexities of our experiences of the world (and our relationships to people and places within it) with the same depth of understanding as intuitive and instinctive thought and feeling.

Dragana Jurišić holds a Three Year Membership Studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (2018-2021). Her work is resolved in substantial series’ and groups of photographs, personal documents, and archive materials that present an overview of many years of work. Her project, My Own Unknown, has been exhibited globally including Gallery of Photography, Dublin (2018); Centre Culturel Irlandaise, Paris (2017); Rawson Projects Gallery, New York (2016); and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (2016). Jurišić’s photobook and series, YU: The Lost Country, is also globally renowned and has been exhibited at Noorderlicht Photogallery, Groningen (2018); Organ Vida Festival, Zagreb (2017); RHA Gallery, Dublin (2014); and originally at Belfast Exposed (2013). Her major work 100 Muses (2015) is in the public collection of the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2019, Jurišić completed the IMMA 1000 residency, and is nominated for the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland for her portrait of poet Paula Meehan, from their collaborative book MUSEUM, commissioned by 14 Henrietta Street.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Atrium connects the public gallery to the individual artists’ private working spaces. Current TBG+S studio artists are invited to use the Atrium to test experimental work or exhibit ideas and artworks in progress.