Stjepan Šandrk a prominent figure in Croatian contemporary art, who has been making a lasting imprint on the art scene with his hyperrealistic paintings, through which he mostly talks about the ways in which we
experience culture and art in today’s society flooded with influence of social media. In his reinterpretation, Stjepan infuses a distinctive and communicative touch, carefully selecting visual details captured by the
camera and transposing them onto canvas with refined artistic sensibility. Within the realm of figurative painting, the artist has consistently and continuously worked to develop a recognizable signature through thematic, compositional, and color mastery. His figurative painting is marked by a distinctive painterly precision, meticulous detailing, refined taste, and a discerning awareness of current events in the media and various social spheres. Skillfully blending these elements, he creates captivating narratives on his painting canvases. Different topics run through his expansive and diverse body of work, from scenes depicted from the art world and the phenomenon of Selfies and Spectacle to the media and digital worlds that he refers to in his last cycle entitled ”Images from the Metaverse”. The images from this new cycle, in which he skilfully mixes the virtual and the real, convey a message in a symbolic way about how these incredible technological advances in our civilization: the internet, digital media, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, are becoming an integral part of our everyday life, changing the world and society we know and they take more and more of our time and attention.
Stjepan Šandrk was born in Osijek, in 1984. He graduated painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in 2006. At the same Academy he completed a PhD, in Art, in 2015. He has exhibited at a number of solo
and group exhibitions in the country and abroad including Croatia, Spain, Italy, Austria, Netherlands. He has won many recognitions and awards for his work. He is a member of HDLU (Croatian Association of Fine Arts). Stjepan Šandrk lives and works in Zagreb.
