Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival

The World of Živa Kraus

Born in Zagreb and Venetian by choice, Živa Kraus has been an irreplaceable figure in the artistic and cultural panorama of the lagoon city for over forty years. She herself defines her life as the consequence of two fundamental choices, the first to enroll in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in her hometown, the second, in 1971, to move to Venice.

A multifaceted personality, in her early Venetian years she combined her artistic practice as a painter with other activities that gradually saw her enter the field, until she became an integral part of it. From his acquaintance with Peggy Guggenheim, whom he assisted in her collection, to his collaboration with Paolo Cardazzo at the Galleria del Cavallino, where he followed the beginnings of video art, and also the curation and editing – on behalf of Carlo Ripa di Meana – of the catalogue of the 38th Venice Biennale From nature to art, from art to nature: there are many experiences and decisive encounters that underpin his path.

But perhaps his main contribution – and tribute – was to provide Venice with a space, until then missing, entirely dedicated to photography. With the opening of Ikona Photo Gallery in 1979, Kraus brought photography to the city at a time when in Italy this language was still struggling to make its way into the contemporary art circuit. The name chosen, which derives from the Greek eikon and means image, encompasses both the imagery of photography as the art of images, and that of the sacred Byzantine icons linked to the history of Venice.

The foundation of the gallery, born at Ponte di San Moisè near San Marco and since 2003 with headquarters in Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, will be followed in 1989 by that of Ikona Venezia International School of Photography. Among the activities carried out outside the gallery, from 1982 to 1991 she was the artistic director of Galerija Sebastian with offices in Belgrade, Dubrovnik and Varaždin and on more than one occasion she was the coordinator of national pavilions and collateral events in various editions of the Biennale. As a painter, Živa Kraus has personally exhibited in many European cities, including Karlovac, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Brescia, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Auvernier and Bern, and is the author of the videotape entitled The Motovun tape made in 1976. In 2019, the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation hosted the exhibition “Memory for the future: 40 years of Ikona Gallery in Venice” to celebrate the gallery’s forty years of activity and to honor the eclectic figure of Živa Kraus as an artist, curator and gallerist.