Non-Aligned Modernity: Eastern-European Art and Archives from the Marinko Sudac Collection
Curator: Marco Scotini, in collaboration with Andris Brinkmanis and Lorenzo Paini
FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy | http://www.fmcca.it/en/
Exhibition ends 23 December 2016
In 1961, strange messages began arriving in the mail at addresses across Zagreb.
A mysterious art group was experimenting with something they called Mail art. One message they sent people was an invitation printed with just three words: “you are invited”. The rest was left blank.
The “proto-conceptual” Gorgona Group was active between 1959 and 1966. It had nine members. They did things like leave paintings in the forest and write each other notes in their own archaic language. They also published an “anti-magazine” called Gorgona. Instead of running articles written by different authors, a new artist was responsible for the creation of each issue. The group liked to emphasize their separateness from traditional art concepts by adding the prefix “anti-“ to to everything, meaning they made anti-paintings and anti-sculptures in addition to an anti-magazine. This theme of negation was also evident in their exhibitions. Sometimes they displayed written descriptions of a piece of art in the place of the art itself.
The Gorgona Group is the core of the exhibition “Non-Aligned Modernity: Eastern-European Art and Archives from the Marinko Sudac Collection“ at the FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea in Milan. The collection is massive: it contains more than 600 works of art by more than 100 artists. Some, like Marina Abramovic and Mladen Stilinović (rip), are quite well known; others are more obscure.
The title hints at what the exhibition is all about. Non-Aligned Modernity “aims to re-read the cultural and artistic spaces” of the former Yugoslavia in the period following its 1948 break with the Soviet Union. Before the Tito-Stalin split, artists in Yugoslavia were still constrained by the aesthetic dictates of socialist realism. But later, uncommitted to either superpower, artists were permitted a great deal more freedom. Yugoslavia’s inbetween-ness is part of what eventually turned it into such a good country for making art: Artists from all over the world were welcome. The Marinko Sudac Collection is an impressive testament to the quality and variety of their output, and includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, vinyl, films, videos, graphic works and books.
The artists:
Marina Abramović, Milan Adamčiak, Karel Adamus, Nuša and Srečo Dragan, Vojin Bakić, Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, László Beke, Jerzy Bereś, Slavko Bogdanović, Eugen Brikcius, Boris Bućan, BOSCH+BOSCH, Dubravko Budić, Dalibor Chatrný, Attila Csernik, Radomir Damnjanović Damnjan, Drago Dellabernardina, Boris Demur, Braco Dimitrijević, Miklós Erdélyi, EXAT 51, Eugen Feller, Stano Filko, Attalai Gábor, Ivo Gattin, Tibor Gáyor, Gorgona Group, Tomislav Gotovac, Group of Six Authors, Milan Grygar, Vladimir Gudac, Gyula Gulyás, Tibor Hajas, László Haris, Miljenko Horvat, Sanja Iveković, Željko Jerman, Marijan Jevšovar, György Jovánovics, Miroslav Klivar, Julije Knifer, Milan Knížák, J.H. Kocman, KÔD Group, Běla Kolářová, Július Koller, Vladimir Kopicl, Jarosław Kozłowski, Ivan Kožarić, Naško Križnar, Andrzej Lachowicz, Katalin Ladik, László Lakner, Natalia LL, Vlado Martek, Slavko Matković, Dora Maurer, Karel Miler, Era Milivojević, Marijan Molnar, Antun Motika, Pécsi Műhely, David Nez, Koloman Novak, Ladislav Novák, OHO Group, Géza Perneczky, Vladimir Petek, Ivan Picelj, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Marko Pogačnik, Jan Pokorný, Bogdanka Poznanović, Božidar Rašica, Red Peristyle, Józef Robakowski, Đuro Seder, Rudolf Sikora, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Aleksandar Srnec, Tamás St. Auby, Jan Steklik, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Josip Stošić, László Szalma, Bálint Szombathy, Petr Štembera, Raša Todosijević, TOK Group, Endre Tót, Desider Tóth, Goran Trbuljak, Jiří Valoch, Josip Vaništa, Verbumprogram, Fedor Vučemilović, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Jan Wojnar, Jana Želibská.
