Mostar Spring: Retrospective - 25 years of artistic work by Vesna Sušac Vuga

Mostar Spring 2025.
Exhibition Retrospective for a quarter of a century of artistic work by Vesna Vuga Sušac

The exhibition Retrospective as part of the Mostar Spring 2025 – XXVII Days of Matica Hrvatska Mostar, with which academic sculptor Vesna Vuga Sušac will mark a quarter of a century of artistic work, will open on Friday, April 25, at 7 p.m. at the Gallery of Queen Katarina Kosača. Along with the 25th anniversary of her dedication to art, the author, who was born on April 25, will also celebrate her birthday.

“The jubilee year is an indicative phrase with which we associate the work of Vesna Vuga Sušac. It seemingly carries a religious connotation because such a year marks a time of special mercy, and it is important to us in considering the work of an artist who, through works of sacred themes with recognizable iconography of Christ and saints and other achievements of pronounced contemplativeness and spirituality, speaks of the driving force of her own creativity. The jubilee year was also the year 2000 when the artist, after graduating from the Academy, began her artistic and pedagogical career. Socially, seen from the perspective of the past, that year also gave birth to its first generation of artists who were educated at the Academy of Fine Arts Široki Brijeg of the University of Mostar, and the stimulating effect of its establishment is still observed today in this new Jubilee Year 2025. For the artist, a quarter of a century is a time of work, research, questioning and decision-making through the prism of sculptural work of grounded and articulated visual production. Through her eight cycles, Vuga Sušac speaks about complex phenomena, simplicity and diversity of approach, in the spirit of excellence, dialoguing with art movements, while creating her own recognizable style. In her work, she relies on the images and sounds of the space in which she lives, literary models and human relationships that have become the impulse for her defined and noble creativity (…)” – wrote her curator Dinko Baković in the preface to the exhibition catalogue.

The exhibition will be opened by the president of Matica Hrvatska Mostar, academician Ljerka Ostojić, and in addition to the author, the head of the Queen Katarina Kosača Gallery, Dalibor Nikolić, and the curator of the exhibition, Dinko Baković, will also speak, who will, among other things, look back on all eight cycles. In the musical part of the program, Josipa Bošnjak will perform on the piano the compositions of Franz Schubert's Three Piano Pieces: No. 2 Allegreto, E flat major and Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata K. 455, G major.

ABOUT THE ARTIST…
Vesna Vuga Sušac was born on April 25, 1976 in Mostar, where she was educated, and graduated from high school and the Faculty of Pedagogy. She graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Široki Brijeg, University of Mostar in 2000 in the class of Prof. Nikola Vučković. She completed her postgraduate master's degree in sculpture in 2011 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, in the class of Prof. Mustafa Skopljak, under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Sadudin Musabegović. She completed her doctoral studies in Ars Sacra at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Mostar in 2023 under the mentorship of Prof. Darko Šobot and co-mentorship of Prof. Dr. Art. Dragana Nuić-Vučković. She is a member of ULUBiH, DHLU and ULU En Face. She has exhibited at 21 solo and more than 100 group and selective exhibitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad. She has won several professional awards for sculpture, installation and drawing. She is a professor at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Educational Sciences, University of Mostar and the Academy of Fine Arts in Široki Brijeg, University of Mostar.