The Klovićevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb is presenting a retrospective of Nada Žiljak from October 1 to November 15, 2026. According to the gallery, it is the first exhibition to show the full span of her work, which covers nearly six decades, in a single place.
The show continues the gallery's Modern Classics cycle of retrospectives devoted to leading Croatian artists. Earlier editions have featured Nives Kavurić Kurtović, Mersad Berber, Nevenka Arbanas, Vasko Lipovac, Josip Botteri Dini and Miro Vuco, among others. Rather than isolating one period, each exhibition in the cycle traces an artist's entire career.
Žiljak was born in Zagreb in 1944 into the Kinert family of artists. Her father, the painter and printmaker Albert Kinert, taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he set up the postgraduate printmaking programme in 1969, and he was one of her teachers. She graduated from the Academy's graphic arts department in 1967 and went on to specialize in illustration in 1970.
Her practice has moved between painting, printmaking and illustration, using oil, acrylic, watercolor and pastel as well as drypoint, etching and linocut. Since 2009 she has also worked on InfraredArt, dual images that hold two separate pictures: one seen by the naked eye and another that appears only in the infrared spectrum. Her subjects range from the human figure and intimacy to landscapes, animals, biblical themes and scenes from everyday life.
Works reproduced by the gallery include "Horizons Recede" (1993) and "Kiss and Bite" (1995), both oil on canvas, and "Deer" (2025), an ink drawing. Žiljak has had around eighty solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad, in cities including Budapest, Cairo, Graz, Kyiv, Paris, London, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei and Pittsburgh, and monographs on her work by Đuro Vanđura, Branka Hlevnjak and Dora Kinert Bučan have been published. The gallery notes that she still paints almost every day.
The exhibition's author and curator is Anamarija Komesarović, with Jagor Bučan as co-author. Jana Žiljak Gršić designed its visual identity.
