Run To See Goran Medak at White Columns (closing soon!)

Goran Medak at White Columns, July 2026

By SIVAN LAVIE July 28, 2026

White Columns holds true to its devoutness to fairness. The tasteful and ever-learning curator Matthew Higgs shows marginalized, under-exhibited artists, forever expanding the art world sideways. In this fantastic solo on the right hand gallery, White Columns exhibits beatifically intricate works by Goran Medak, a 76 year old autodidact Croatian artist based in New Jersey. 

The works are truly magnificent. They stubbornly resist immediate relationship to art history and its schools and trends, though familiarity stays at the tip of the tongue nagging like an like almost sneeze throughout the visit. It takes several loops around the gallery to put your hands up and say yes, these are truly unique, only to then go home to bed still obsessing about the works, pondering what they remind you of. Then the next morning as you brush your teeth one idea comes to mind maybe… Paisley? Like, London’s Liberty print fabrics? And you look up an image and yes, that’s true.

Goran Medak, Broken Symmetry Manifestation 3, 1988. Oil on canvas in artist's frame, 54 x 38 in.

Insights like that trickled in for days and weeks after I saw the show. Because of this haunting ricocheting effect, I mapped out a hyperassociative map of Medak’s placement in art. As you scroll, you can see the artistic relatives of this unusual artist, and consider the various effects taking place all at once in his deceptively simple works. Yes, I found a lot of associations, yet none completely match his style, and this this wonderful webbing that helps us appreciate and place him within a wider context. I do not include all the names in my synthesis below, but at the end of the article is a come extensive map I created of Goran Medak’s spiritual relatives. 

One fascinating aspect of Medak’s work is its homunculus nature. It folds in on itself, creating beautifully intricate infinite surrealist realities. This can be likened to Blush Bullseye’s work, whose naïve paintings invent and reinvent evershifting perspectives: a person gives birth to themselves, crying tears that spout high-heeled feet, scuttering in all directions. In the case of Bullseye’s Pickled Berry Stomp Grounds and the Anxious For Get Me Nots (2026), a woman squeezes herself into tunneled tubes of odd sizes, shifting and morphing her body’s shape to fit through each of them. Another interesting contemporary perspective shifter is Jesse Martin, whose Instagram video art is sweeping the algorithm. Each reel depicts two fingers navigating an iPad screen, forever zooming into different parts of the image.

An image of a tongue, blue from licking a lollipop, for example, reveals a whole city atop it once zoomed in on. The fingers navigate sky scrapers atop the tongue and zoom into the Empire State Building, and into its window, where a man builds a model of an island, which is in turn zoomed into. And endlessly, the macro and micro are investigated revealing more and more endless looping universes. Modak’s paintings similarly create micro worlds within his paintings. He gives much respect and room to the size of the canvas, thus the worlds  built are proportionately tiny, meek, barely visible, discoverable upon close inspection. In Memories of Dalmatia (2022), for example, in one third of the canvas, while leaving the rest minimally painted, the artist builds out tiny intricate worlds using a detail brush. These are caveman-ish abstracted worlds, Miró-like, exploring dot, line, eye, squiggle, that double as hill, sea, road, fence. These universes have tiny components that multiply, serving as scenes that are part indecipherable, part recognizable as tiny waterfalls, livestock, lakes. Together these artists illuminate Medak's fascination with nested realities and unstable scale. Yet unlike any of them, his worlds never announce their complexity, instead whispering it.

Goran Medak ,September 2022, 2022. Oil on canvas 44 x 46 in.

Detail from Goran Medak, September 2022, 2022. Oil on canvas, 44 x 46 in.

Detail from Goran Medak, September 2022, 2022. Oil on canvas, 44 x 46 in.

Detail from Goran Medak, September 2022, 2022. Oil on canvas, 44 x 46 in.

If scale is one of Medak's defining concerns, line is another. Medak’s brush strokes dance with a sincerity equal to Marc Chagall’s. Something pure and untainted is revealed in hesitant, spurt-like, bursts that waiver like flames. A similar quality of purehearted lines is seen in Madge Gill’s work, who was a visionary, untrained artist. For her, too, hours of markmaking, each mark considered equally, creates a multilayered, complex composition. When her name came into my mind, I was deeply satisfied. It is through connecting his work to hers that I realized how the obsessive and repetitive nature of Medak’s work serves it deeply. This visionary quality allows otherworldly images to arrive from the beyond, Medak working diligently to paint coded messages, led by spirits. 

Goran Medak, Adriatic Motive 2, 2020. Oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 31 in.

The contemplation of line and color in relation to composition are another element of interest in Medak’s work. Contemporary artists Shai Yehezkelli and Josh Smith share Goran’s sensibility of playful expressivity. Yehezkelli exhibits a conscious balance between dense and sparsely painted areas of the canvas, juxtaposeing areas of colored washes in wide strokes with singular undulating thick lines, areas that are left unmarked, then areas of detailed lines. These musical pulses create a balanced whole. Josh Smith’s lines, too, undulate with melodic freedom and color. Recursive lines in technicolor create a sense depth while maintaining a flat appearance.  Medak’s works have such musical whimsy, owing to his quill-like, long, brightly colored brushtrokes left as visible lines, blending avoided. This musical contemporariness plays a role in Medak’s work, bringing it into conversation with these current cousins. Yet it only dips into this pool, while also stretching in other directions.

Goran Medak, Untitled, 199.  Oil on canvas in artist's frame 32 1/2 x 34 1/4 in.

 Goran Medak, Beaver Lodge at Night, 1998. Oil on canvas in artist's frame 42 x 44 in.

I would argue that the most elemental part of Medak’s work is its fantasy-leaning nature. This is where Medak’s ancestry is from the realms of animation, illustration and fantasy paintings. The feathery buoyancy of Medak’s style strongly evokes Dr. Seuss’s work. The swirls in Broken Symmetry Manifestation 3 (1988) look a lot like Gertrude McFuzz’s fuzzy ever-growing tail. Grinch like fur and fingers can be seen throughout the paintings, and the curiously imagined landscapes, like in Beaver Lodge at Night (1998) are certainly equivocal to Oh, The Places You’ll Go! (1990) With the pop of color of saturated oil paints, Medak builds landscapes and semi-figures perching on islands, feathers, and even in the air that could easily find their way into a child’s picture book.

This illustrated playfulness conjures the ghosts of a ‘cousin’ Saul Steinberg, and his goofy cartoons, and a more distant ‘uncle’, Sir John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland etchings. It’s the detail that is poured into the ridiculous that is shared in this lineage. Medak’s fantastical landscapes take after old masters like Pieter Bruegel, but at the same time would not be foreign on Cartoon Network, in a show like Adventure Time (2010-18). It is the cartoon style of demons, angels, ghosts, shields, fires, islands and planets that would lend itself to contemporary animation, and the concurrent existence of several narratives on the same canvas that appear as storyboard for time-based adventures. The speculative fiction element of Medak’s work is the strongest and most surprising construct, and where his bloodline is most varied and exciting. 

Goran Medak, Pareidolia in Spring, 2023. Oil on canvas 44 x 46 in.

What a family reunion! Leaving White Columns, I didn't feel that I had finally placed Goran Medak within art history. Quite the opposite.  Medak created an itch that’s been hard to scratch. His paintings expanded it, calling over so many relatives from all walks of art. He bridges gaps between folk art and modernism, children's illustration and visionary painting, fantasy TV and contemporary abstraction in a way that surprised me for weeks. Few painters continue working on your imagination after you've left the gallery. Exposure to his works will make you want to read some Dr. Seuss, watch Adventure Time, see some great visionary art and contemporary color abstract painting, watch Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, look at some Chagall, float in water, zoom in on your iphone, fly like angel, play the fiddle, jump between hills, and create something completely new. WM

Goran Medak at White Columns

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