Andrej Kurtin - Particles and Waves

Solo Exhibition of Academic Painter Andrej Kurtin

TOŠ GALLERY, PUNAT

June 12 – July 2, 2025

Particles and Waves

For Andrej Kurtin, painting means contemplating, viewing reality through the lens of spiritual, intellectual, and even philosophical critical thought. His starting point is grounded in the properties of light rays, whose duality he applies and establishes in his artworks. By thinking through sketches, hand movements, and numerous pencil strokes, his paintings shift perspectives, blurring the boundary between what is represented and its subjective meaning—both for the artist and the viewer. His motifs often appear in pairs—seemingly similar copies, yet different, with a conceptual shift.

Though inspired by the real world, his work transcends into entirely personal expressions: thoughtful and analytical, imaginative and creative. The artist's own vision influences the interpretation of reality, causing a shift in understanding through transformation and change of expression. Like light, sometimes his work is composed of a series of particles—abstract notes that, once combined, find their way into visual representation—and sometimes, like waves, it projects directly onto the canvas through lines, creating imagery.

His motifs are created in large-format acrylics, with surfaces enriched by charcoal and pencil traces, featuring detailed drawings and hints of volume. The translucent backgrounds and objects are full of intriguing textures, subdued colors, and black-and-white tones. Through interventions, modifications, and contextual shifts, the artist gives his figures, plants, and animals new meanings and dimensions. By isolating them, he presents them within the context of art itself.

Playing with meaning, he places them in dreamy, surreal settings. In examining relationships, he unites the values of drawing and painting. The created surfaces are refined and subtle, detailed and full, forming a base where fragments of a fast and dynamic handwriting evolve. The many layered elements bear even graphic qualities of recorded brushstrokes.

Thus, a projection of the personal world emerges—a scene through which we perceive his reflections and aesthetic. Reality is transformed into feelings, into creative symbols interconnected by fine pencil lines and flowing layers of color.

These evocative visual stories bring us sensory frequencies of mood, rapture, and attitude. Through them, we may not fully grasp the actual reality of the depicted motifs, but we can feel their vibrations and the imprinted impression of a moment in time—a memory of the moment they left their painterly trace. With his developed visual language, Andrej Kurtin unites and reveals the invisible—yet defining and powerful. He senses the currents and forces that surround us and, through contemporary and creative thinking, transfers them onto canvas, drawing us into his world woven from networks of lines, surfaces, and color.

— Jasna Rodin, M.Sc.

Andrej Kurtin was born in 1971 in Rijeka. From 1991 to 1994, he studied at the Faculty of Education in Rijeka, Department of Fine Arts. He graduated in painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice in 2000, in the class of Professors Eugenio Comencini and Mirella Brugnerotto.

Since 1998, he has continuously exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad, including the 18th International Drawing Exhibition at MMSU Rijeka and the 58th Annual of Contemporary Art at the Istrian Assembly Hall in Poreč.

Since 2001, he has been a member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HDLU) in Rijeka.

In 2022, he was awarded the Kortil Gallery Prize at the 76th Annual HDLU Rijeka Exhibition.

Address: Osječka 30, 51000 Rijeka