Stipan Tadić ’20 Presents New Solo Exhibition, ‘Metropolis: 36 Views of New York’

Presented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York, Metropolis: 36 Views of New York is a new solo exhibition by Visual Arts alumnus Stipan Tadić ’20, on view now through September 5, 2023.

As noted in the press release, the show takes its title from both the 1927 film from director Fritz Lang as well as artist Hokusai’s famous woodblock-print series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

“The series, like its name, is a mosaic of references,” reads the exhibition statement. “Throughout the 36 paintings on view, Tadić maps the neighborhoods surrounding the D line train from the Bronx to Coney Island. The series is the result of a year-long walking tour during which Tadić documented well-tread and lesser-known cityscapes, taking photographs, collecting historical references, and observing passers-by. Allowing his mind to wander and his senses to guide him, the artist absorbed locales where he has little context and no personal roots. Instead, Tadić activates his imagination to reveal the microcultures of each enclave; scenes where landmarks like Greenwood Cemetery and the Apollo Theater intersect with cues from religious iconography, folk art, and video games—a topography layered with both the quotidian and allegorical.”

Alongside the in-person exhibition, JamesFuentes.Online also presents a series of ten related works from Tadić, which you can explore further here. The gallery will also publish an exhibition text from James Fuentes Press to accompany the show. The book will further detail the featured artworks alongside essays in both English and Croatian by current Columbia University Art History PhD candidate Julián Sánchez González and Andrija Škare, respectively. 

Tadić and González met at Columbia during a School of the Arts open studios event in 2018. From there, the two have gone on to forge a meaningful friendship: 

“Having a shared interest in the simplicity of form, the value of candid communication, and the desire to build a more honest and transparent art world has made our time spent together greatly influential for each other,” writes González. “Our common experience as immigrants of limited means living on scholarships in a city with rampant inequality levels brought us together. We set as our guiding inquiry a simple but pressing question: How can we possibly cut through all the nonsense of living in a place like New York City?”

The exhibition text will celebrate its launch at the James Fuentes Gallery in New York on September 5, 2023.

Learn more about the exhibition, including how to plan your visit, here.

Stipan Tadić was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1986. He finished his MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2020 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2011. His first solo show was in 2009, and from then on he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has been doing murals in public spaces since 2012 around Europe. In 2014, he published his first comic book, entitled Parisian Nightmares, and has participated in independent comic zines since. He is the co-organizer of the Biennial exhibition of Antisalon, which was founded in 2012 and is a biennial show which continues today. Tadić received the Best Young Artist Award from HDLU, Zagreb in 2013 and was awarded 1st Prize at the International Comic Book Festival in Lodz, Poland in 2018. Tadić currently lives and works in New York.