The exhibition presents seventy one works of art from the Museum of Naïve Art in Jagodina and some private collections. It includes thirty five artists of different artistic inclinations and generations who best represent the essence of the naïve and marginal art in Serbia.

Naïve art is one of the authentic segments of the Serbian cultural heritage and represents a unique part of the contemporary artistic life of the country. It digresses from the academic painting as well as from the amateur lack of skill. Both the naïve and marginal art emphasize on the content and inner feeling taken up by the instinct and the flight of the spirit. It relies on the strong personality and its drive to find its own way of depicting the surrounding reality.

The strength of the means of expression with the naïve painters is to be found in the total lack of restraint and disregard for pre-taught patterns. Fighting the technical inexperience and looking for their own ways of expression, these artists arrive at some personal solutions and at a frivolous artistic play between the spirit and the imagination.

The Museum of Naïve Art in Jagodina was founded in 1960 at the time when this particular art was at its height around the world. Today it acts like an active centre of the naïve and marginal art being in possession of an international collection of over 2500 works and implementing some serious projects. So far the museum has organized over 400 group and solo exhibitions in the country and abroad. It also organizes a Biennale and an En plein air of naïve and marginal art. Works of art from the rich collection of The Museum of Naïve Art in Jagodina have participated in some of the most prestigious exhibitions among which one has to mention the exhibitions in Paris, London, Melbourne, Vienna, Prague, Bratislava, Bucharest and many towns in Holland, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Belorussia , Italy.

A catalogue of the exhibition has been published in Serbian, French and English.

The author of the exhibition and the text in the catalogue is Ms. Nina Krustic, Director of the Naïve Art Museum in Jagodina.
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The exhibition is organized by:
Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria
Embassy of Serbia in Bulgaria
Sofia Art Gallery
Museum of Naive Art, Jagodina, Serbia

GNTHER UECKER Mistreated Man 14 Pacified Implements

05 June 2007 - 05 July 2007

“My subject is life and death”, “my failure is my art”, says the internationally well known artist and recipient of several awards, Guenther Uecker (born in 1930) about his works. His work “Mistreated Man: 14 Pacified Implements” that Uecker created in his workshop in Düsseldorf, commissioned by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IfA), also lives through this contradiction.

In many of the works Uecker shows a kind of inner portrait of his visions of life and suffering, processes experiences, registers feelings and tries to reveal, in his sensitive setting of signs, basic human drives: aggression, injury, destruction, setting against them gestures of reconciliation. Uecker reacts to the “injury of human being by human being” in the language of form typical of him – with slats of wood, linen cloths, stones, ash, sand, pages of writing and of course nails (Uecker became famous as the “man of nails”). The actual background of these works created in 1992/93 was the violence against foreigners in Germany that continues even today. As Uecker says, “Thus my protest, my statement is an expression of my agitation, a portrait of an artist, so to speak.”

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The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa), Deutschland and Goethe-Institute Bulgaria.