Artist Practice
Bernard Šimunović works with the line, not because he chose it, but because it was always there.
His practice is rooted not in theory, but in craft. Long before he entered the academy, he knew the point as a precise, irrevocable gesture, set into stone, obligating toward what must not be forgotten. In the tradition of the Balkans, the dead are carved in marble so that the face remains. This experience , that a mark is not designed, but set ,has shaped everything that followed.
The line came later. But it carried the same weight.
The thread that runs through all of his work is life itself.
Across every body of work, Šimunović pursues one question: what remains when everything unnecessary falls away? What is the irreducible trace of a life, a moment, a relationship?
Dots - Marble Works
The earliest body of work emerges in stone, and the longest.
From the early 1990s, before the Seismograph Portraits, alongside them, and beyond their close . Bernard returns again and again to the point as artistic material. While the line, on canvas, traces a particular arc, the marble works run quietly beside it and reach past its end.
The point does not flow. It arrives, and it remains. Where the canvas holds movement, the stone holds duration. What the Seismograph records as a continuous pulse, the marble works hold as a single, gravitational instant. A presence not given to time.
Seismograph
Portraits
The line as pulse. Before
theory, before the academy, a single unbroken stroke recording what is alive.
The seismograph does not interpret. It registers. Bernard's earliest paintings
carry this same obligation: to set down what must not be forgotten.
Thread of Life
The surrealist oil paintings of the Thread of Life series explore the thread of life as visual metaphor , enigmatic, symbolic, layered. Woman, animal, parachute, fishing line. Everything hangs from the same invisible thread. Fate connects without being seen. "I used to paint surrealistic, but as you can see, I had always been fascinated by lines."
These surrealist oil paintings are Bernard's most symbolic works, and yet, beneath the imagery, the line is already there. Not yet bare, not yet reduced. Waiting.
Titel; Thread of life, 140 x 100 cm, oil on canvas, 2011
Complex Simplicity
With Complex Simplicity, the imagery becomes more human, more direct. Mother and child. Lovers. Dancers. Smokers. The cycle of life in its most recognisable, most tender constellations. Reduction sets in.
The symbolism does not retreat; it condenses into the human figure itself.
The figures here carry a sculptural weight. Alongside his painting, Bernard has worked in sculpture: busts, torsos, figurative studies that share with these canvases the same instinct: to bring a body into a single, irreducible form. On the canvas, that instinct survives. The figures stand the way a bust stands : present, grounded, taking up space.
Titel: Smoker, 100 x 70 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2012
Relational Lines
The thread arrives at its destination, but the journey continues. Figures emerge and dissolve. Abstraction and emotion, rhythm and stillness, the recognisable and the barely-there. What holds it all together is not form, but relation. Proximity and distance. Approach and missing. Two elements that know of each other . Sometimes a body,
sometimes a gesture, sometimes a line that carries the full weight of a human
presence.
What becomes visible is not always the figure, but always what arises between.
Titel; Shades of Happiness, 100 x 100 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2025