EXISTENTIAL ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY SCULPTORAL PRACTICE
a selection from the Fund of sculptures from the collection of the SLU Niš Gallery
On Thursday, March 7, 2024, at 7 p.m., the exhibition “Existential questions in contemporary sculptural practice” will be officially opened in the International Art Studio “Radovan Tranavac Mića”. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art from Niš, as part of the program marking the Day of the City of Valjevo. The author of the exhibition is the museum advisor Milica Todorović.
The exhibition consists of the works of ten sculptors, whose works are part of the Contemporary Sculpture Collection in the collection of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Nis, which is predominantly based on the works of artists from Serbia, but also authors from all the former Yugoslav republics. In front of the audience are the sculptures of Zlatko Glamočak, Mirko Marić, Rajko Popivoda, Zdravko Joksimović, Dragan Jelenković, Marko Crnobrnja, Mrđan Bajić, Gabriel Glid, Radoš Antonijević and Rado Mutapović. The Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Nis has enriched its collection with exhibited works thanks to the participation of the aforementioned authors in the work of the “Sićevo” Art Colony, or purchases from their individual and collective exhibitions realized in Nis.
Ten artists, whose works make up the exhibition, treat completely different phenomena of reality in a symbolic and metaphorical way, through narratives whose sources belong to the fields of human psychology, ethics or are from the domain of ecology, social and social politics.
“On the occasion of the presentation in Valjevo, a selection of ten sculptures created during the last twenty years was made. The exhibition is conceptually designed to emphasize two characteristics typical of recent sculptural practice. The first is of an artistic-visual character and implies the phenomenon of breaking through and expanding the established notion of sculptural, which is accompanied by the process of relativizing definitions of sculpture. The second change is of a content-cognitive nature, and it manifests itself primarily in the domain of expanding the thematic repertoire of sculptural works with those themes that contain a clear allusion to the existential questions of the life of a man caught in the labyrinth of existing social circumstances. We must emphasize that the process of shaking the “certainty” of modernism, which was content with so-called neutral themes and mostly artistic research, began with the appearance of a new generation of sculptors, mostly from the Belgrade art scene, at the end of the eighties of the 20th century, but it experienced its serious momentum only in this century, i.e. the last about twenty years. It is precisely the awareness of contemporary humanistic and ethical issues that is the common denominator of the works that make up the exhibition in Valjevo, pointing us to the existence of different aspects of artistic engagement”, says the author of the exhibition, Milica Todorović.
The exhibition will be open until April 1, 2024.