A chance for New York art lovers to enjoy a taste of Croatian inspiration.
A major exhibition dedicated to art in Eastern Europe and Latin America from 1960 to 1980, which includes some of the Croatian artists as well, will be opened on Saturday, September 5, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The international media is describing the exhibition as one of the six cultural events in New York which should not be missed, reports Jutarnji List on September 3, 2015.
Through the works of many prominent artists, the exhibition “Transmissions – Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980”, which will be opened until January 3, compares socially unstable situations in the so-called Eastern Europe before the fall of communism with a similar turbulent socio-political climate in Latin America, which had significant repercussions on the art scenes of these countries in turbulent two decades between 1960 and 1980.
On both sides of the Atlantic, in Eastern Europe and in South America, the artists had been working far from the art market, which actually did not even exist there. They were relatively autonomous in relation to demands of their societies, and shared the criticism of institutions, including especially those belonging to the museum-gallery system, as well as of general political establishment and society as a whole.
The exhibition brings together important works from MoMA’s collection of Eastern European art, including Croatian artists Tomislav Gotovac, Sanja Iveković and the Gorgona Group. Other Eastern European representatives are Geta Bratescu, Ion Grigorescu, Dora Maurer, OHO, Actual, Fluxus East, while Latin America is represented by Beatriz González, Antonio Dias, Lea Lublin, Ana Mendieta and others.
Works by Croatian authors feature prominently in marketing materials which announce the opening of the exhibition, including the reproduction of one of the famous globes of Croatian artist and former curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, photos of members of the Gorgona Group from the opening of Julije Knifer’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1966, and a work by Sanja Iveković (In the Apartment, 1975), who had a great success in the MoMA in New York with her retrospective exhibition “Sweet Violence” (2011/2012).
Croatian art historian Tihana Puc has recently published a study which found that the most prominent Croatian visual artists have been exhibiting abroad 25 to 30 times a year, and that number has been increasing. She has analyzed 6400 exhibitions which involved 61 Croatian artists from 1991 to 2012, including 3,707 international exhibitions. However, the study has found that more than 80 percent of younger Croatian visual artists have no visibility on the international scene.
