Željko Kipke is a painter, author of films, writer, performer, video artist, art critic, curator. He is one of the most prolific Croatian post-conceptual artists whose work features multimedia and intermediality.
Željko Kipke’s painting is characterized by analyticity, eclecticism and theoretical and artistic completeness within a single cycle. Moving from the primary painting, through the geometric shapes and their references in the semantic field outside of painting, to figural, Kipke rejects the division of the figurative and abstract.
A wide range of references can be found in his painting: from Malevich’s cross, Byzantine frescos, to pictorial illustrations of clips of everyday life. He was an associate of the Working Community of Artists Podroom since it was founded in 1978 in Zagreb. During this period, the focus of his interest was the relationship between visual art and global culture, in particular youth activism and subversive movements and groups, and the ethical position of creativity in a social process. He created a series of processual and performative works close to body art and aesthetics of shock, which he photographically documented and exhibited as photographic installations, often with textual interventions. In the same period, he began his engagement in experimental film by making six movies, later included in the compilation Six Easy Pieces. His films are characterized by the immediacy of cinematic language, as there were no subsequent montage interventions in the material.