Atelier & Gallery Ostrman
Tomislav Ostrman has taken on the responsibility, or rather the mission, to present his worldview and obsession to the public, driven by an urge to engage through art, revealing a strong sensitivity and concern for the world we live in. He does so unburdened, playfully, but above all humanely, and thus effectively. For Ostrman’s paintings are infused with an abundance of positive energy that fills the exhibition space itself, reflecting genuine emotions and establishing an intimate connection with the viewer, drawing them into a fairytale-like adventure, a wondrous world of innocent, almost childlike narration.
Grounded in socio-sociological determinants and the primacy of human relationships as the central element of artistic endeavor, Ostrman’s painting assumes the task of encouraging the public to engage in active perception and participation. Consequently, the aesthetics of his art are relational, becoming a relevant element of human connections, disregarding its own materiality, while its social mission becomes its essence.
Finding answers to his artistic practice in the theory of Nicolas Bourriaud, he discovers meaning and purpose in engagement. According to Bourriaud, new artistic activity, among other things, expresses a стремление toward creating alternative pathways, removing obstacles, and finding passages to the audience. It provides fertile ground for social experimentation, ensuring a space where uniqueness, creativity, and nonconformity can thrive, and works aligning with this theory belong to a UTOPIA of the near future. Yet, as exceptions confirm the rule, Ostrman transforms this future into the present with his own crafted utopia. Like Thomas More, he creates an ideal state within his paintings—the Kingdom of Sailors and Whistlers.
This ideal society inhabits a space defined by the atmosphere of the Mediterranean. It is populated by stylized, typified figures treated with intense, pure colors and the language of basic geometric shapes. A passionate drive toward narration leads Ostrman to reach for visual forms reminiscent of comics or children’s animated stories. The simplified drawing, placed in indeterminate spatial relationships, serves the interpretation of themes that have crystallized in his rich imagination as ideas for a visual story.
The main protagonist of this “sweet utopia” is the sailor Fućkalica, Ostrman’s homo ludens, who carefree lives in his ideal world while ships take him on distant wanderings, always returning him to a safe harbor where, like a lighthouse, his faithful Žveglica awaits. As a symbol of a liberated spirit, a person of pure heart, strong emotions, and intuition who lives life with joy, Fućkalica is also a character whose name encompasses a form of nonverbal communication (whistling), which Ostrman explores through his art. Hence, the name of his companion is drawn from musical terminology—žveglica being an old Croatian wind instrument.
This interplay of the auditory and visual, of image and sound—key features of Orphism, which visualized sound through concentric circles arranged in visual soundwaves—finds its variation in Ostrman, often represented by colorful circles as well. The circle, as one of the fundamental geometric elements, constructs this visual narrative as a sign, a symbol of perfection and divine emanation, and as materialized sound. By combining it with other geometric shapes—most often triangles and horizontal striped grids with which he depicts the bodies of his protagonists—he also treats the entire pictorial space.
Indeed, it becomes the very format of his work. Within this perfect shape, all scenes of the new cycle unfold, as if viewed through the round portholes of a ship toward the shore of Ostrman’s magical utopia—a land of eternal happiness, but also a world governed by rules, hierarchy, and high moral values. In the definition of the term fućkalica—a whistler—lies the notion of a person (a worker) who reports illegal actions within their community or collective.
Whistling often tests a person’s moral values, values that Tomislav Ostrman, perhaps unconsciously, continually highlights through his work. Though rooted in the realm of easel painting in his new cycle, Ostrman’s visual expression is characterized by intermediality, collage, diverse material structures—from relief to pure two-dimensional painting—manifesting in “classical paintings,” installations, reliefs, sculptures, and even performances.
His work is a blend of the trivial and the artistic, a discovery of new forms and content, extracting transcendental qualities and bringing visual elements into new contexts. The works are the fruit of a clearly crystallized idea, an imagined ideal world where play, as a defining human category, shapes other value systems. His artistic play is driven by sociability and interaction, revealing how an artist can engage with the time in which they exist—not merely commenting on it ironically or ambiguously, but connecting, including, and interpreting it explicitly and sincerely.
Thus, Ostrman’s paintings are unconventional and imaginative, creatively playful, unburdened by the need to follow other avant-garde trends. They belong to the prospective “near future” described by Bourriaud, reserved for artistic personalities—today called nomads, tomorrow bearers of a social mission. Yet, art has always been a protagonist of relational dynamics, exposed to interaction, predestined for communication, dialogue, and sociability. When it ceases to be so, when it becomes an end in itself, it seems to lose its original role or merely proves that the time has come for change, for self-saturation, and for adapting its role to the era. It will thus become not only a social framework for the reception of art but also its meaning and purpose. Ostrman’s painting has created such a tangible vision of an alternative reality, where the profane and the spiritual, the everyday and the artistic, art and its audience coexist in skillful symbiosis.