ZORAN MINIĆ

It’s likely that only very few Berliners have explored their city as thoroughly as he did. During countless long walks he investigated the city, always with a sketchbook in hand. He drew anything that interested him, and once back at the studio transformed it into a colourful painting.

Buildings, bridges, trees, the S-Bahn, water—Havel Spree, Wannsee—and whatever he found there: boats, a diving platform, buoys; a typical factory building from the nineteenth century, a stately home, a church are all part of his repertoire. He reduces the many recorded details to just a few elements, as if he had set himself the task to depict the city’s character in an exemplary fashion; only the constructive elements and the form are important.

The elements of the city, reduced to prototypes, are for Zoran Minić building blocks that he keeps playfully assembling into a new cityscape in always new ways. Piers leading into the water, quays, railings are used as perspectival lines off into the distance. And he always just shows a part of the whole; the pictures continue in our imagination. The issue is not completeness, but a play with elements, planes and lines. The issue are the straight constructions made by humans, as opposed to the soft, crooked, accidental forms of nature. We can understand the proud intellect of humans, striving upwards, and yet: humans cannot build a living tree. But how much trees would be missed, how lifeless would a world be that is exclusively created by humans.

Iconography of Berlin is part of his long going investigations on urban and rural landscapes.

Zoran Minić (*1964 in Serbia) holds a Master’s Degree in design at Domus Academy, Milan. After years working as a partner with Aldo Cibic, he founded POP Solid with Dragana Minić, a multidisciplinary and experimental practice where they develop design narratives and architectural projects. Zoran is among the founders of ‘Recession Design’, a research group looking for new Design Do it Yourself solutions. Two books were published of their work by Rizzoli.