FINE ARTISTS OF NIŠ ‒ A SELECTION OF WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF GALLERY SLU NIŠ
The desire and need to study the works of fine artists from Niš in the collection of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Niš was stimulated by a significant anniversary – 150 years since the birth of Nadežda Petrović, a famous painter, art teacher, organizer of cultural events, author of art criticism, a socially engaged woman who collected ethnographic subject and expressed her patriotism as a war photographer and nurse in the Balkan wars and the Great War. She was the progenitor of Serbian modernism, our most significant artist at the beginning of the last century. She founded the First Yugoslav Art Colony in the village of Sićevo near Niš, the forerunner of today’s Sićevo Art Colony.
The time in which she and her contemporaries lived and the position of women in society are significantly different from today. The beginning of the twentieth century was a period of intense struggle for women’s emancipation in all segments of life and society, and over a hundred years later, although not all over the world, women have the right to vote, can study and work, but our society is still patriarchal. on the way to achieving equal opportunities for all.
In the first decades after the liberation of the country in the Second World War, according to the general social climate, political and material conditions, modest conditions of schooling and training, the position and education at that time, and despite the already won women’s rights, there were only a few academically educated authors in the city. The development of culture, the activities of the Association of Fine Artists, the establishment of the Art School and, later, institutions specialized in contemporary creativity, led a greater number of women to pursue the professional practice of fine art, and the end of the twentieth century marks the appearance of new generations of female painters and graphic artists, who are involved in current trends , presenting his work independently or at collective screenings, as part of residency programs and projects.
The personality, creativity and social engagement of Nadežda Petrović were the immediate inspiration for dealing with this topic, with the intention of pointing out the valuable contribution of women who were engaged in art and were active participants in the artistic and cultural life of Niš.
With the establishment of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art in 1970, Niš received an institution that, from the very beginning, in addition to monitoring, popularizing and presenting contemporary national and foreign creativity, was also dedicated to collecting, preserving, studying and protecting works of art. Today, the gallery is a heritage in the artistic, aesthetic and historical sense of a valuable fund of 1778 exhibits classified into five collections.
The collection of works by the artists of Niš, formed thanks to gifts, purchases, the Sićevo Art Colony, the Graphic Workshop and other types of programs, gives an insight into the flows and multi-layered changes of the visual scene of this region and is the subject of curators’ activities and studies, until now based mainly on analysis in thematic -motive, i.e. style-media sense.
Part of the Collection consists of the works of artists who live, work and create in the city of Nišava, or who are related to this climate by origin or work history. The collection of the Gallery includes a hundred works by forty female authors of different generations, stylistic orientations and artistic practices, who represent the significant cultural heritage of the city and map Nišlijke as fruitful actors of the cultural life of their environment and the entire country.
From the very beginning, the gallery has tried to follow and support the work of artists of different ages, from the very young, through artistically formed representatives of the middle generation, to already established, prominent protagonists with rich careers, members of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS), winners of awards and significant recognitions for work. Some of them were educated or trained abroad and were active in international frameworks, and a certain number of them are dedicated to pedagogical work at the Faculty of Arts, the Art School or related educational institutions.
As is the case in the Collection of fine artists of Niš and the fund as a whole, their works are dominated by graphics, paintings and drawings, valuable in terms of getting to know the work, following creativity, individual development path and insight into the art scene of the city. Only a few sculptures are represented, with a noticeable absence of interest in research in the field of new media and photography. The collection is enriched with these exhibits mostly thanks to the Sićevo Art Colony and Graphic Workshop, and a certain number are individual gifts or purchases from independent and collective exhibitions.
In order to comprehensively present the work of female authors from Niš, fifty works created between 1973 and 2021 have been selected for this exhibition. These are works exhibited individually, at independent or collective exhibitions, published in catalogs and monographs, but never presented as a whole. Heterogeneous in visual expression, approaches and reflections, in a given chronological framework that includes the period immediately before and since the establishment of the SLU Gallery, as the parent institution that follows the activity of the creators of the city, up to the current moment, these works depict