Some of the questions we asked ourselves about Dubravka Rakoci’s subject of circles and meditations surrounding them

1. Is it important that circles were cut out as strips from unbleached linen (technical canvas), pieced together to the width of 450 cm, 550 cm or the maximum of 1,000 cm, and then cut by hand, circularly, without hemming, and why is that important?
What determines the relatively large dimensions of circles?
How important is the fact that the relatively quick-drying acrylic paint is used to colour the circles?
In the studio, only one colour is applied across the entire surface of the circles; is there a reason for that?
Is the choice of the first colour intuitive or programmatically defined?
Does the reason hide in the fact that the surface of the circle is always monochromatic, painted in the studio, where the canvas is laid down on the floor?
The canvas of the circle is affixed onto walls outside the studio with a staple gun. Wouldn’t using glue as with linen wallpaper be more elegant?
Would the glued circle thus remain permanently fixed to its background, while stapled it still leaves the possibility of taking it back to the studio and then moving it somewhere else?

2.When the circles are exhibited, they are placed on interior and exterior wall surfaces. Does that determine when the circle will be full or folded?
The circle is folded when its surface is greater than the surface of the wall. The question that arises is whether instead of being folded it could continue to spread out on the ceiling or the floor?
The circle-painting could not exist without the wall it is intended for?
Could the circle-painting ever be installed on the floor or the ceiling of the exhibition space?
Does every change of the wall surface that the circle is displayed on also become the reason for a new painting?
Was it possible to exhibit only one circle for 40 years, and have it always become a new painting in assigned spaces?
One such painting, and only that one, would then be an Omni-painting because it would comprise all interventions dictated by previous spaces. Or would it have been an Omni-circle?
Or it would be an Omni-circle if that circle of canvas was to enter all spaces and their walls, without being folded at its ends?
But then the circle would only have one “studio” colour, so it would not be a painting.
To summarize. The circle’s studio colour is always the colour that the largest surface is painted with, while the outside-studio colour is applied only in those places where the circle touches another wall, ceiling, or some obstacle. The canvas is folded in that place and on that section of the white folded linen, which now appears, a new outside-studio colour is applied. Does this mean that the ideal form of the circle is lost and it becomes a truncated-circle-painting, or?
A circle is the perfect form. A circle that is painted and brought into the gallery is also the perfect painted circle, but it becomes a painting only when the circle stops being a full circle, after its ends are folded and painted anew, therefore when it becomes a truncated circle but the perfect painting?
While the circle’s studio colour is red, the outside-studio colour on the folded section is usually going to be black which means that the first studio colour is largely intuitively selected, while the one outside-studio is a given? 
The painting is therefore painted twice: first in the studio, but it is also painted in the gallery, however that is not necessary if there are no obstacles. If two perfect circles have been brought from the studio, and only one has an obstacle in space and has the second colour applied to it in the gallery, do we then have one perfect painting and one perfect circle?
Could the canvas circle also be exhibited upside down so that the painted studio side is “mistakenly” turned towards the wall, thus revealing the white colour of the unpainted canvas and studio colour only when the circle is folded in the place where it encounters an obstacle of another surface, wall, ceiling or floor?
Does the circle become a painting only when it is affixed to a wall, while stored in a depo it is only a painted circle of unbleached linen?
Of the thirty-odd paintings in total that Vermeer painted, when they are stored in a depo and not exhibited they continue to be Vermeer’s paintings, while the thirty-odd circles that DR created thus far, when they are in a depo and not displayed on a gallery of museum wall, are they not paintings even then?  

3. Is it possible to visually connect the circle-painting with something in nature or elsewhere?
Can we view the circle-painting as a large timeless wall clock without hands like the street clock in Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries?
Is the circle before us not a greatly magnified Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang, that we ourselves are supposed to complete in our mind?
Are we experiencing the circle’s movement to its right or left side, i.e. is the circle coming into space of leaving it?
Could the full red circle on the church tower in Umag or the octagonal Venetian tower in Split mislead us into thinking that we are actually seeing a large glass rosette or remind us of the full Moon in perigee or the low afternoon Sun? 
If we are not visually connecting the red circle on the Japanese flag with a plate of tomato soup on white tablecloth, but with a rising Sun, would it then not be logical to connect DR’s large circles not with pizza, as one of our politicians suggested, but also with the Sun?
Why would DR’s giant circle affixed to a wall of the Riverside Gallery in London be less impressive and not accepted as the Sun, while only ten years later everyone experienced Olafur Eliasson’s equally large circle exhibited in the same city in Tate Modern, exactly like the Sun?

Circular motion
To many, these thematically grouped questions will seem like nit-picking. It will especially irritate those who are well acquainted with DR’s work, while this “philosophizing” will not be of much help to others to better understand her work.    
It is also equally clear that in her career, she did not only work with circles but also with coloured light, total ambience, copper models of sculptural lamps, drawings, etc.
However, it was precisely the circles that provided an opportunity to raise these many questions.
Therefore, everything is known.
Still, this is exactly why it seemed interesting to ask even the silliest of questions again, and examine one more time that which in itself we already seemed to have known. This, of course, is not about examining one incontestable oeuvre and established artistic decisions that have consistently been implemented, but about a desire to go back to preschool age when we wanted to hear, again and again, those stories we loved most, even after hearing them a hundred times, allowing ourselves small improvisations and deliberate mistakes in order, to our immense pleasure, to return to the familiar story.      
Some of these “pointless” questions we also posed to DR. This is when we learned, or maybe she reminded us of what we have forgotten in the meantime, that she named some of her circles Watercolour, which is a beautiful title that reflects an occasional transparency, an imperfect acceptance of colour for the canvas or the puncturing of its structure, thus giving the circle airiness and lightness. If someone, upon entering the gallery and observing from a distance, was to think that her circles are actually some contemporary wall frescoes, they would not be mistaken in terms of similarity of techniques because, both watercolours and frescoes are painted fast, water dissolving the pigment, and they do not allow for the lack of skill. But her circles, although an integral part of the wall, are nevertheless removed after the exhibition. It was also good to learn from her that each new circle is created intuitively when she estimates that a space really needs it, whether because of rhythm or composition of the entire exhibition, as well as the fact that each individual circle can be exhibited many times and that colour interventions on those circles are applied multiple times. Some paintings, those that were bent and folded the most, could have as many as fifteen-odd layers of paint.       
We did not ask some of the questions. Those considered to be rude. For example, about the market value of her paintings. Are paintings with most interventions also the most expensive? Does the buyer understand, whether a museum or a collector, when they select their circle, that this painting when mounted on their new wall, will perhaps encounter an obstacle and be painted at the fold, and will not be the same painting that they selected in the gallery? Again, superfluous questions. 

One decision, beyond the main one, to paint her paintings exclusively within the surface of a circle – much like Agnes Martin always painted within squares larger than herself – is a decision DR made, while folding some of her coloured circles and placing them inside a transparent plexiglass cube were solutions that intrigued her. The circles were probably folded differently in the studio. They were certainly not kept in transparent boxes as she liked to show them in exhibitions. A circle folded in a square box and exhibited in such a manner, demonstrates a particular attitude. Something that used to be open, spread long and wide, is now compressed, constricted but still shown to the audience. The only thing missing from inside the box is that naked little man with outstretched arms, for us to have an objectification of Leonardo’s famous drawing of the Vitruvian model of human proportions, with outstretched legs and arms inscribed in a square and a circle, which is perhaps what is being conveyed to us. The thought of that man brings us into closer connection with the circle.            

The circle on the wall is larger than its artist and the audience viewing it, while the circle squeezed in a box is closer to the human dimension. That which is sublime in one moment, may be different in the next. Or, there is only one step from art to life and vice versa. The artist understands this well. In the book The Power of the Center, Rudolf Arnheim explains something similar. In that drawing the man’s navel is the centre of the circle, which to Arnheim represents the most beautiful of all formats. For him, the circle is a model of cosmic concentricity. In the drawing, above the navel is the head, the intellectual, spiritual sphere, and down below is the pelvis, the sexual sphere, which together represent the material and the instinctive nature of man.         
Romanesque and Renaissance art liked the circle and expressing itself within it. Interestingly, relatively few contemporary artists reach for this form. Perhaps Richard Long and Dubravka Rakoci are among those rare contemporary artists who have remained faithful to it for a long time and systematically. It took Long a substantial amount of time to transfer circles of stone slabs from the horizontal, floor position to a wall as painted mud circles, while Rakoci’s painted circle would, in time, descend from a wall and search for its sculptural position on the floor in a plexiglass box.    
And were we to permit ourselves further meditations on the subject of the circles by Richard Long and Dubravka Rakoci, we could imagine the following. Hypothetically, Long found his initial inspiration for using the circle in his daily walks from his apartment to Saint Martin’s School of Art. Looking upwards, towards Big Ben, he saw the circle and its seven metre in diameter circular dial. And Dubravka Rakoci, who says that architecture is her second love, perhaps found her inspiration in the circular architectural plan of the Meštrović Pavilion. They both went, we say only hypothetically, in the opposite direction from the initial spatial position where their idea originated, he downwards and she upwards, in order to return to where they started from, he above and she below. We would say it is a circular motion as well.     

The circle is again on the wall and we are discussing it. The blue circle titled Watercolour reminds her of water, air, and each next one of something else, similar… Which is why, at some point, it was rather important for her to hear how different people accepted her coloured circles, so mostly her friends, not strictly from artistic professions (a historian, surveyor and cartographer, psychiatrist and similar) described their experience in a few sentences. The painter talks about colour, of how colour in her mind leads to sensual stimuli similar to what touching water, or just the view of it, provokes in her. The rest of us talked about shape, form, about the circle. 
It would be interesting to see how those previously mentioned acquaintances and friends see her works today – then and now. Are we in a similar position now?
Instead of giving answers that she would like to hear, fresh and inspiring, something she herself did not know about her paintings, we are asking superfluous questions.
In fact, we, her audience, want to see and hear just one more time what we know and what in her works we like. ( Goran Trbuljak 2019.)

Exhibition Mediterranean 2020, Split, Kula Gallery

The task was clear: to turn two exhibitions into one. To transform the display for the palace (Milesi Palace) and the display for the tower (Kula Gallery) into one event inside the monovolume of the tower.
Kula Gallery: gallery in a building with defensive character! How symptomatic for 2020. This is where the problem was solved! It is a place created for being and protecting!
Therefore: one circular canvas completely unfolded, as planned, and works meant to be shown in the palace, separated, folded into display cases. And that is that! (Dubravka Rakoci)

Dubravka Rakoci, born in Zagreb in 1955. In 1979 she graduated from the department of painting of the Zagreb Academy of fine arts in Raoul Goldoni’s painting class. She has exhibited her work since 1979. From 1980 she’s been working as a graphic designer as well. From 1983 to 1984 she ran several painting workshops in student campuses. During the 1991/92 schoolyear at École d’art de Aix-en-Provence she tutored third- and fourth-year students in professor Valensi painting class. From 1993 to 1998 she conducted art classes at the Zagreb high school for textiles, leather and design. From 1998 to 2007 she was an art director at Školska knjiga d.d. in Zagreb. As a senior lexicographer she is the head of the Visual Arts editorial office at the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographic Institute in Zagreb since 2007.