Ninety-Nine EGGS

Do you remember what you did when the pandemic shadow of lockdowns fell on the Czech Republic? Did you sew masks? Did you bake sourdough bread? Did you do the 30-day fitness challenge? Croatian entrepreneur and trained lawyer Ivan Mestrovic decided to expand his horizons and plunged into business in the art sphere. From that moment on, he brought 26 egg-shaped sculptures to the world, which, according to him, symbolize the perfect shape, symmetry, but also the process of birth and protection. All the sculptures from the EGG Series project, weighing several tens of kilograms, have the same size, they measure exactly 52 centimeters, they differ only in the material used. "I plan to have 99 eggs produced and with each subsequent one I will use more radical material," said Ivan Mestrovic during his recent visit to Prague. He wasn't there by chance - twelve eggs made of, for example, white marble, black granite, a gilded alloy that is commonly used in the space industry, or thousands of years old wood, Abonos, exhibited here during one evening at the of the Holy Cross in the second courtyard of Prague Castle.

The businessman, incidentally an admirer of the world-famous Indian-British sculptor Anish Kapoor, the author of beans reminiscent of the Cloud Gate sculptures in Chicago, is not afraid to provoke with the selected materials for his eggs. "I'm not an activist, but in my opinion art should provoke reactions," thinks the businessman, who was also a co-owner of a football club in his native Osijek. In his case, this is definitely going well. For example, we can consider Radioactive eggs made from radioactive waste from nuclear power plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima, Japan, as controversial. It has a lead center with a potentially hazardous material, Ivan Mestrovic had the statue's insulating shell made from concrete, the same material used in the sarcophagus protecting the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. What could be more radical? We have to let ourselves be surprised. The businessman, who lives alternately in Dubai, Monaco and Budapest, indicated that another possible material used is an innovative airgel. And he didn't rule out that the ninety-ninth egg could be invisible.