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Silvio Vujičić

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Silvio Vujičić (born 10 November 1978 in Zagreb) is a Croatian visual artist and fashion designer. Working across printmaking, sculpture, installation art and performance art, he is known for using laboratory processes, such as crystallization, distillation, extraction and sublimation, to transform rare, hazardous or ephemeral materials into artworks.[1][2] Recurring themes in his work include clothing fetishes, sexual identity, the history of pigments and dyes, gardens and fountains, toxic and psychoactive substances, death and transience.[1][3] His practice has been described as operating at the intersection of art, science, fashion and ritual.[4][5]

Silvio Vujičić
Born (1978-11-10) November 10, 1978 (age 47)
Zagreb, SR Croatia, Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia)
EducationAcademy of Fine Arts, Zagreb; Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Known forInstallation art, sculpture, printmaking, performance art, fashion design
Notable workUnder the Daisies (2005); Exposed to Virus and Fashion (2006); Alchemical Polyptych (2009); Nocturno (2025); Metaanswer (2025)
MovementContemporary art
Websitesilviovujicic.com

Early life and education

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Vujičić was born in Zagreb in 1978.[1] He attended a technical secondary school before turning to art, and has said that as a child he expected to become a mathematician, physicist or painter.[3] He studied printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and trained as a designer of textiles and clothing at the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb.[1][5]

Career

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Fashion and early work

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Vujičić began his career in fashion, and has also worked in theatre as a costume designer.[3] In 2002 he founded the fashion label E.A. 1/1 S.V., through which he has connected fashion with themes drawn from contemporary society, politics and art.[2] He has described fashion in the 1990s as a medium "faster" than art, and often used the forms of fashion—such as the runway show and the advertisement—to distribute artistic content.[3][4]

His installation E.A. 1/1 S.V. Menswear Store #1 (2004) rebuilt a Zagreb gallery and its street façade to resemble a fashion boutique, filled with paper and textile garments and placed under surveillance cameras.[2] In Exposed to Virus and Fashion (2006), presented as part of Queer Zagreb, he introduced a fault into the software of textile machines so that the resulting garments emerged damaged and partly disintegrated; they were then shown on a runway, in a work drawing an analogy between biological and digital "viruses" and reflecting on the body, contagion and social difference.[5]

Materials and process

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Vujičić develops materials according to his own recipes using chemical laboratory methods, working with substances including plant extracts, pure caffeine, mineral and organic pigments, crystals and biological fluids.[1][5] His studio in Zagreb has been compared by journalists to a chemical laboratory or alchemical cabinet.[5][3] Many of his works are marked by processes of transformation in which a piece comes into being or disappears over time—colours fade, alcohol evaporates, crystals grow—so that the process itself becomes part of the work.[2][4] For the performance Perfume (2006), shown at the Device Art festival, he produced perfume from visitors' bodily fluids using laboratory equipment.[2]

Over time his work extended to gardens, pigments and poisons. For Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or doesn't yet exist (2015), at the French Pavilion of the Student Centre in Zagreb, he assembled a garden of edible plants and works including carpets of dyed wool and a perfume made from bodily secretions, referencing Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.[5] He has extracted the red pigment carmine from cochineal insects (Dactylopius coccus) to make self-portraits, and produced prints using toxic cyanogenic glycosides extracted from Hydrangea flowers.[5][2] The art historian Sanja Cvetnić has analysed his paired works Unstable Fountain and Stable Fountain (first shown 2015; reworked 2024) as an extended dialogue with Bosch's triptych, built from blown borosilicate glass and containing circulating extracts, crystallizing chromium alum, seeds and biological fluids.[2]

Recent work

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In the 2020s Vujičić's work moved increasingly toward digital technology while retaining a personal, archival dimension. In collaboration with the artist and researcher Miro Roman he developed SOLL, an artificial-intelligence "designer" trained in part on the archive of his fashion brand, presented in projects such as Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit.[3][6] His installation Nocturno (2025), part of the sequential exhibition Tko je Elsa Fluid, to se zna produced by the Art Pavilion in Zagreb and curated by Irena Bekić, was staged in the pavilion of the Zagreb Botanical Garden. Using alkaloids extracted from the Datura plant, he produced chromatographic plates on which silkscreen-printed texts appeared, separated into layers and evaporated within seconds under solvent vapour.[1][3] For the 60th Zagreb Salon (2025) he presented Metaanswer (Metaodgovor), an interactive "digital oracle" assembled from several thousand short video clips recorded over five days from roughly 10,000 sentences written by the artist: a visitor poses a question and the archive recombines the fragments into a different, probabilistic response each time, so that no two answers are alike. The role of the oracle is performed by John East Thomas, described as an artist, sex worker and activist.[3][7][8] Also in 2025 he showed SKIN(S)CARE, a project in the form of a cosmetics line made from toxic and irritant plants, at the KONTEJNER space in Zagreb, curated by Olga Majcen Linn.[9][4]

Themes and reception

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Critics have identified transformation, process and the instability of matter as central to Vujičić's practice, alongside a "forensic" method of research into materials and their cultural histories.[3][5] In interviews he has framed art as functioning "like a virus" that infiltrates and changes systems from within, and has discussed the body as a site of resistance and the thin line between care and control.[4] Journalists have repeatedly described him as one of the more intriguing figures in Croatian contemporary art, noting that his exhibitions often resemble scientific experiments.[5][4]

Selected exhibitions

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Vujičić has exhibited in solo and group shows in Croatia and internationally since 2002, in countries including Austria, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, China, Japan and the United States.[1]

Selected solo exhibitions:

  • Under the Daisies, Modern Gallery, Studio Josip Račić, Zagreb (2005)[10][11]
  • Alchemical Polyptych, Museum of Contemporary Art shop, Zagreb (2009)[12]
  • Caput Mortuum, Student Centre Gallery, Zagreb (2010)[13]
  • Destrudo, Richter Collection / Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2012)[5]
  • Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or doesn't yet exist, French Pavilion, Student Centre, Zagreb (2015)[5]
  • Fountains, Filodrammatica Gallery, Rijeka (2024)[2]
  • Nocturno, pavilion of the Zagreb Botanical Garden / Art Pavilion in Zagreb (2025)[1]
  • SKIN(S)CARE, KONTEJNER, Zagreb (2025)[9]

Selected group exhibitions:

  • Aspects of Collecting, Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg (2009)[11]
  • Translife – International Triennial of New Media Art, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2011)[2]
  • Star-Dust, FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (2012)[14]
  • Exploring the Media Boundaries, Digiark, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2014)[15]
  • Thingworld – International Triennial of New Media Art, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2014)[16]
  • 8th Croatian Triennial of Graphic Arts, Gliptoteka HAZU, Zagreb (2019)

Public collections

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Vujičić's work is held in public and private collections in Croatia and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; the Filip Trade Collection; and the Lauba collection, Zagreb.[1][17]

References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Silvio Vujičić: Nokturno". Art Pavilion in Zagreb (Umjetnički paviljon u Zagrebu) (in Croatian). Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Cvetnić, Sanja (2024). "Silvio Vujičić: Fountains — Silvio Vujičić's Unstable Fountain and Stable Fountain". Drugo More. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Duka, Zvonimir (6 October 2025). "Umjetnost daje sugestije za drugačije mogućnosti (interview with Silvio Vujičić)". Vizkultura (in Croatian). Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Sandić, Srđan (18 October 2025). "Silvio Vujičić: 'I politika, i religija, i mediji nude sigurnost, ali pod uvjetom poslušnosti'". Telegram.hr (in Croatian). Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Martek, Matea (19 July 2018). "Silvio Vujičić – genijalni umjetnik obavijen misterijem". Grazia (in Croatian). Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  6. ↑ "SOLL". soll.store. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  7. ↑ "AI prorok u tijelu 18+ glumca u centru Zagreba. Metaodgovor briše granice fizičkog". Index.hr (in Croatian). 2025. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  8. ↑ "Razgovor – Silvio Vujičić & John Thomas". Croatian Association of Artists (HDLU) (in Croatian). October 2025. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  9. 1 2 "Ovo nije obična njega kože: Silvio Vujičić u KONTEJNER-u šokira i fascinira Zagreb novom izložbom". Hello Magazin (in Croatian). 2 September 2025. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  10. ↑ Majcen, Olga (2005). Ispod tratinčica / Under the Daisies (exhibition text). Zagreb: Queer Zagreb.
  11. 1 2 Szöke, Annamária, ed. (2009). Aspects of Collecting. Klosterneuburg: Essl Museum. pp. 110–111.
  12. ↑ Cvetnić, Sanja; Jakšić, Jasminka; Simončić, Katarina Nina; Jašprica, Ivona (2009). Alchemic Polyptych (artist book and exhibition catalogue). Zagreb: Studio Silvio Vujičić.
  13. ↑ Cvetnić, Sanja (2010). Caput Mortuum (exhibition catalogue). Zagreb: SC Gallery.
  14. ↑ Portier, Jean-Marc (2014). Star-Dust: XXVIe Ateliers internationaux du Frac des Pays de la Loire. Carquefou: FRAC des Pays de la Loire. pp. 78–79.
  15. ↑ Exploring the Media Boundaries (exhibition catalogue). Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Digiark). 2014.
  16. ↑ Fan, Dian; Zhang, Ga, eds. (2014). Thingworld: International Triennial of New Media Art 2014 (exhibition catalogue). National Art Museum of China / Liverpool University Press. pp. 136–137.
  17. ↑ Richter, Marina (2009). Finalisti Zbirke Filip Trade (exhibition catalogue). Labin: Gradska galerija Labin.

Further reading

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  • Cvetnić, Sanja. "Silvio Vujičić: Mundus inversus i metamoderna", in Imago, imaginatio, imaginabile – Zbornik u čast Zvonka Makovića, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, 2018, pp. 403–414.
  • "Silvio Vujičić: Interview", Oris, No. 81, Zagreb, 2013, pp. 196–197.
  • Jakšić, Jasminka. "O virusima i otiscima: noviji radovi Silvija Vujičića", Oris, No. VIII-38, Zagreb, 2006, pp. 148–155.
  • Paić, Žarko. Vrtoglavica u modi: prema vizualnoj semiotici tijela, Altagama, Zagreb, 2007, p. 208.
  • "Croatian Modern", Art in America, No. 6, New York, 2003, pp. 62–69.
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