ACQUISITIONS 2015-2023 / PURCHASES OF PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES.
In its fifty-five years of existence, the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts Niš has, thanks to various types of acquisitions (purchases, gifts, Art Colony “Sićevo”, Graphic Workshop “Sićevo”), formed an impressive fund that currently numbers 1,798 works of art, classified into six collections. Since purchase is the safest and most relevant method of acquisition from the point of view of the value of a work, during the first twenty years of its existence, the Niš Gallery purchased works from numerous exhibitions for its collections, but this process was forcibly interrupted in the early 1990s, with the closure of the city and republic funds for the purchase of works of art due to the deteriorating economic situation in the country. After a long break, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia began to announce annual competitions for “financing works of art for the needs of art gallery and museum collections” in 2014. Regularly participating in these competitions, GSLU Niš has purchased 61 works with the funds of the Ministry of Culture, including 2023, including 22 paintings, 16 sculptures, 15 works of new media and 8 works on paper. Since eleven works purchased in 2014 were exhibited at the previous exhibition Acquisitions, on this occasion we are presenting to the public for the first time all the paintings and sculptures purchased in the period from 2015 to 2023.
The exhibition consists of paintings by: Mihael Milunović, Nikola Džaf, Miško Pavlović, Bratislava Basic, Nikola Marković, Pulai Arpad, Ivan Šuletić, Vesna Knežević, Jadranka Mišić Pejović, Ivan Milenković, Srđan Đile Marković, Tadija Janičić, Igor Antic, the DIMTIM group, as well as sculptures by: Mrđan Bajić, Željka Momirov, Gabriel Glid, Dragan Drobljak, Rajko Popivoda, Gordana Kaljalović Odanović, Zdravko Joksimović, Dragan Jelenković, Marko Crnobrnja, Nikola Pešić, Dragoslav Krnajski, Radoš Antonijević, Balša Rajčević, Rade Mutapović and Anđela Grabež. All the purchased works possess high aesthetic and artistic regularity, they typically characterize the individual artistic handwriting of the artist, testify to the dominant motif-thematic preoccupation of the author and to the authentic visual expression. Most of the works contain clear echoes of general social circumstances at their semantic level and represent the author’s intellectualized reaction to the characteristics of the current time, expressed in a metaphorical or symbolic manner.
The purchase policy of the GSLU Niš is continuously based on respecting several important principles, namely: unifying the exhibition and museological activities of the institution, adequate monitoring of the national scene, filling the collections with works by artists who are not represented in them or are insufficiently represented. Thanks to the purchases made, the collections of contemporary painting and contemporary sculpture have been significantly enriched with valuable works, the vast majority of which were exhibited in Niš, the number of authors represented in the GSLU Niš fund has increased, and most importantly – the purchases made have significantly contributed to the development of these collections, not only from the point of view of quantitative replenishment, but primarily from the point of view of increasing their overall qualitative value and updating. The exhibition will run until April 6.