Description

The intensely varied and prolific artistic production of Vesna Kittelson always maintains autobiographical connections. Her recent installations of deconstructed books, as well as her luminous drawings of fountains, recall her childhood in Split, Croatia, where the ruins of Diocletian’s palace from the fourth century AD remain in the contemporary city center. Her early color field paintings represent people and places she remembers through color and abstractions, evincing the focus of her art studies at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s. Her war paintings portray tragedy and emotion related to the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, as well as her own reactions to the 9/11 attack on her new country, the United States. The brilliant botanical watercolors in her artist’s books result from her research on Charles and Emma Darwin in Cambridge, England. Her large paper sculptures dramatically express personal reflections through color and three-dimensionality. Her dynamic cutout portraits of her art students reveal her bonds with fellow immigrant artists of a later generation. These many materials, subjects, and genres, like her self-portraits, show Kittelson’s deep engagement with a great array of everyday worlds.

A vital participant in the Twin Cities arts community for several decades, Vesna Kittelson demonstrates through her ever-evolving practice and her multiple roles as artist, professor, and colleague her strong passion for creativity and her astonishingly diverse, international, and rich artistic career.

We wish to acknowledge the following donors for their very generous support of Synthesis:

Mari lyn Ampe

Karen Bachman

Nick Collings

Jil Evans

Lyndel and Blaine King

Paul Kwok and Pat Hui

Andrei Kittelson

Joyce Lyon

Jennifer Martin

Kerry Morgan

Jodi Reeb

Cathleen Ryan

Michael Stoughton

Wendy Welsh

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