Academic painter and graphic artist Safet Zec will present his works at this year’s 60th Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia). The host of this prestigious art event, the City of Venice, invited Zec to present his works in the Venice pavilion.
“This, for me, relatively late invitation to exhibit at the biennale, represents another confirmation of the quality of my work and I hope that I will present Venice, which is now my city, and of course my country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, from which I came and to which I I often return,” said Safet Zec and added that he will form his own studio at the biennale and show some of the more significant works belonging to his oeuvre in a working atmosphere.
“I myself was a refugee, a man who left his country that he loved, in which I lived, studied, and which was destroyed by war and nationalist divisions. I migrated in 1992 and chose Italy, believing that it would be a short stay and that the war in my country would end quickly. At that time I had no idea that Italy would become my second home. After a six-year stay in Udine, in 1998 I chose Venice as a place to live and work, and there I will exhibit several times – in the del Leone gallery , twice in the Grande Scuola San Giovanni Evengelista, in the Correr Museum, in the Della Pieta Church,” Zec recalled.
He expressed gratitude and joy for the invitation to exhibit in the Venice pavilion, which he believes gave him “an opportunity to once again present his works to the Venetian but also to a wider European and world audience.”
The Venetian pavilion, curated by Giovanna Zabotti with commissioner Maurizio Carlino, will be called “The Domestic Sextant”. Two more painters, Pietro Ruffo and Vittorio Marella and the poet Franco Arminio, will be presented in that pavilion.
Curator Zabotti, describing the selection of Safet Zeca, said that “his paintings reveal the need to illuminate the drama of war, hunger and flight, indelible memories that belong to his personal history, but also to our everyday life”.
“The way to feel at home is faith, when you have faith, whatever it is, you have home,” said Zabotti, adding that Safet Zec’s works represent “a search for universal order that includes the celestial sphere, like a gaze turned toward up with his hands in the extraordinary works of Safet Zec. Each of his pictorial compositions is like a prayer, it is an act of complete devotion and faith towards the meaning and importance of art”.
The 60th International Art Exhibition, which this year is called “Strangers Everywhere” and will be open from April 20 to November 24, 2024.
La Biennale di Venezia is the world’s oldest and most prestigious art event, which was first held in 1895.
