Stipan Tadić

ATM Gallery is pleased to present Visions of the City, a solo exhibition of paintings by Stipan Tadić.

For Stipan Tadić there is always romance. In Visions of the City a series of paintings come tantalizingly close to forming a complete story arc. Dense with imagery, Tadic articulates in a style that negotiates the art historical into the proletarian grammar of comic books, arriving at a core which defies boundaries, in which Medieval illuminated manuscripts mingle with video game aesthetics and 1980’s neon. Here, vignettes surface, of people haunted and depressed, of Tadić himself, and most of all, of life in New York City.

Three men, lonely, Balkan, their faces smushed by their drunkenness. A bar scene transported from the din of Eastern Europe into the United States. In another work, a man zones out on a leather couch, depressed despite the machinations of the club he is in. Demons, like spectral doodles, swirl amidst the black lights and pumping bass.

In a painting of the East Village housing projects, windows glow orange, magenta and green. A multitude of stories become palpable—the lives of people behind window sills, gathered on street corners. These are visions of the city, in which Tadić floats over Central Park. The intestinal tangle of pathways and trees are lit by streaks of light; the journey of a protagonist described in glyphs which zoom in on his journey.

Tadić‘s work is like a highly detailed cover of a graphic novel, reaching out to pull us in. What lurks inside is for us to find out.

Stipan Tadić (b. 1986) is a Croatian born artist. He earned an MA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (2011) and an MFA from Columbia University (2020). His first solo exhibition was in Zagreb in 2009 and since then he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions.

—Isaac Brosilow