Aleksandar Ivanovski Karadare
born in 1943 in Prilep, Yugoslavia (today N. Macedonia), lives in Skopje
Continuity in Red, 1973
painted wood
MoCA Skopje
Karadare’s small-scale wooden figure is an exception within his body of work. The artist works primarily with traditional materials such as stone and bronze; his later works are mostly decorative and charmingly figurative.
The sculpture “Continuity in Red”, by contrast, appears significantly more expressive and seems more like a bozzetto—that is, a sketch for a large-scale monument. Its taut form, the dynamism of its lines, and its heightened expressiveness point to the artist’s more experimental phase in the early 1970s. A comparable example is Karadare’s monument to the revolutionary Goce Delčev in Strumica, which also displays an expressive, dynamic formal language. Perhaps the work was also created in the context of the exhibition the artist organized in 1973 together with two colleagues at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje.
In the context of this period, the small wooden work can be linked to the so-called spomeniks—monumental memorial structures of socialist Yugoslavia. These monuments commemorate the partisan resistance and the victims of World War II and are characterized by their abstract, often futuristic-looking design language.
Against this backdrop, “Continuity in Red” appears less as an intimate individual figure and more as a condensed model of an idea that focuses on movement, energy, and collective memory.