Croatian graphic designer and visual artist Ivan Križan develops a series of digitally printed art photographs that isolate details from natural forms, placing them on the boundary between abstraction and figuration and rethinking what abstraction actually means.
The word abstract is commonly used in art to mean something unreal, something that has departed from observable reality. Ivan Križan disagrees. His series Abstracts begins from the word’s actual etymology: abstractio, meaning extraction. Abstraction, properly understood, is not a departure from reality but a process of drawing out what is essential from it. That distinction drives the whole project.
The photographs isolate details from real natural forms, carefully framed to shift focus from what is immediately legible to what requires longer looking.
“By shifting the focus from what is easily noticeable to what is visually more difficult to decipher, the work moves to the boundary between the abstract and the figurative,” Križan says.
At first glance the images appear abstract; on closer observation they reveal themselves as real motifs, extracted from larger scenes and placed into a new visual context. “These photographs isolate what is essential, characteristic, and compelling within a real scene.” The two experiences, abstraction and recognition, happen in sequence and the gap between them is where the work lives.
The photographic approach sits within what Križan identifies as neopictorialism: the digital-age inheritor of pictorialism, which treats the camera as a creative tool rather than a documentary device, emphasising beauty, composition and tonal values, and using digital processing to achieve effects once achieved through darkroom manipulation. It is a style that asks something that seems contradictory: to use cold digital technology to produce images of elemental emotional warmth. Križan makes the case that this is still possible.
Each photograph is digitally printed in an edition of ten, mounted on KAPA panels at 70 by 70 centimetres. Selected works from the series were exhibited in Zagreb in February 2025.
Ivan Križan is a Croatian graphic designer, illustrator and visual artist based in Zagreb. He runs his own design studio, founded in 2003, and teaches Visual Design, Typography and Digital Illustration at Algebra University in Zagreb.
Website: krizands.com
Instagram: @ivan_krizan_
Abstracts, 2024. Digital prints, edition of 10, mounted on KAPA panels, 70 × 70cm. Selected works exhibited at a gallery in Zagreb, February 2025.
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