Arts

Pulling at the art strings

Detail from Goran Tomcic’s “Heart Strings.”

Goran Tomcic marks his return to Miami with an installation at Dimensions Variable (a Knight Arts grantee) that shouts out intensity of process and attention to detail that results in a spectacular display. Tomcic has fastidiously cut out little golden-colored hearts, leaves, flowers, shells from Mylar and attached them to thousands of strings of fishing wire, creating a shimmering web, a flowing series of curtains that transforms the downtown space, hanging from the ceiling and on the walls.

The installation, “Heart Strings,” took a year to create, and is in line with the other detail-oriented, eye-popping pieces that the native of Croatia has shown throughout the world in the last decades. All together, 12 works were crafted for the gallery space.

Now a resident of Berlin, Tomcic did a stint here in Miami in the late 1990s as director of the Wolfson Galleries at Miami-Dade College. His installations and collages, so often meticulously layered – in terms of process and deeper meaning – have a universal resonance, not unlike the life of the artist himself. Born in what was still Yugoslavia, he got his M.A. in curatorial studies here in the United States and received the prestigious Pollack-Krasner grant while working in New York. Along with his own art, he’s also a well-known art critic and poet, published internationally as well. It’s good to have him back, if just for the summer months.

“Heart Strings” opens Saturday, July 12 and runs through August 22 at Dimensions Variable, 100 N.E. 11th St., Miami; 305-607-5527; dimensionsvariable.net.