In the unique setting of the Museum of Fine Arts’ atrium, one of Croatia’s most prominent contemporary sculptors, Alem Korkut, presents an exhibition titled “Corpus.” It features a selection of seven sculptures from the eponymous series, which together form a unique formal and thematic whole. These sculptures were first presented to the public in 2017 at the “Božidar Jakac” Gallery in Kostanjevica na Krki. Executed in polyurethane, the sculptures are derived from geometric shapes - cubes, cuboids, and parallelepipeds. However, as they conceptually embody the ideas of transience and instability, the original forms lose their definition and transform into seemingly unstable, almost vanishing bodies.
In the exhibition foreword, Boris Greiner notes: “Manipulation of material, or rather, interventions on expectation – such as suggesting fluidity in a hard material, like raindrops in baked clay, or conversely, moving what is presumed immovable, where the pedestal supporting the sculpture occasionally loses its strength and buckles under its weight – is a persistent orientation in Korkut’s sculpture. Thus, it could be said that by continuing his characteristic approach of constructing the fluid or dissolving the solid, he establishes a language through which he communicates, in this case with the right angle as the elemental postulate.”
The artist himself explains this cycle: “The concept of the body, in all the meanings it encompasses, for example, anatomy, geometry, oenology, politics, esotericism, is a synonym for solidity, strength, and reliability... Over time, the physical body loses strength and firmness, the body in a political sense becomes exposed and loses reliability, it loses its clear contours, ceases to be a possible support, disappears, melts away...”
Alem Korkut was born in 1970 in Travnik. He finished primary and secondary school in Banja Luka. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo in 1991. Continued the study of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he graduated in 1997. He is the author of several sculptures in public spaces, among others the “Caryatid” sculpture in Pazin (2002), The Bicycle monument in Koprivnica (2005), memorials to the war veterans of the Homeland War in Šibenik (2006), Karlovac (2009) and Koprivnica (2016). He is the author of the monument to the defenders and liberators of Bihać (2020). Among others, he won the Grand Prize of the 27th Youth Salon in Zagreb, the HDLU’s annual award for a young artist in 2004, the Grand Prize of the Split Salon in 2009, and the third prize at the T-HT nagrada@msu.hr exhibition in 2011. , and one of the three equivalent Awards of the Triennial of Croatian Sculpture in 2018. He is the winner of numerous awards in competitions for sculptures in public spaces. Exhibited at about fifty independent and about two hundred group exhibitions. From 1998 to 2007, member of HZSU in the status of an independent artist. Since 2003, member and then president of the artistic organization Atelijeri Žitnjak. Since 2007, he has been teaching sculpture at the ALU in Zagreb.