Slaven Macolić was born in Zagreb in 1964. He grew up in the Atelier Brezovica where his creative development began. He attended interdisciplinary courses at and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, after which he continued his postgraduate education in Kassel, in the class of professor Dorothee von Windheim. He spent time studying in Paris, Vienna, Prague, Florence, Amsterdam and Brussels. He participated in many group and solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. He won several prestigious awards and recognitions, among them the award at the 14th Zagreb Exhibition of Drawings and the 28th Zagreb Salon of Visual Arts.

Slaven Macolić’s figure of Pinocchio is no longer a sympathetic character from children’s literature, whose fate discretely spreads moral doctrine, but an obsessively repeated creature that no longer has anything to do with simple-minded world of the little ones. It is an ugly, intrusive figure with an improper anatomy, in one version rendered with a colouristic vortex of fierce and nervous brushstrokes, and in another reduced to a skeletal structure and sparing colours. Therefore, in this creature the painter is given an opportunity to universalize its concrete character to general meanings, and through it, to create an entire grotesque world. All that Macolić is doing is in line with that deep, internal need of the artist to perform – through the process of painting, even if we call it a “therapeutic” act – a kind of personal purification and to repay a certain debt that has accumulated over time.