Nova Gorica City Gallery
Founded within the premises of the Slovene National Theatre Nova Gorica and initially operating under the auspices of the Goriška Museum, the management of the Nova Gorica City Gallery was in 2000 transferred to the Nova Gorica Arts Centre.
Programme and mission
Beside the organisation of the Pixxelpoint International Festival of Computer Art, the Nova Gorica City Gallery features up to 10 exhibitions per year prepared by the house and very often by guest curators of national and sometimes international origins. Solo and group exhibitions embrace all genres of contemporary art; projects are selected according to their quality, their originality of ideas, and their achievements in relation to contemporary art movements. The gallery tends to present a complex, quality-based view of the Slovene and international artistic production, as well it pays attention to artists from the area of Nova Gorica.
Exhibitions
The year 2008 saw a rich programme of solo exhibitions by Aleksij Kobal, Lujo Vodopivec, and Bojan Štokelj. The multimedia exhibition entitled Data Collision featured beside the work of young and internationally renowned art collective BridA and renown postgravity artist Dragan Živadinov also two international names (Hans H. Diebner, Florian Grond).
In 2009, the group exhibition Eros Kalos — grounded on the Brane Kovič's curatorial idea of confronting various accessions of erotic iconography (from the explicit, implicit and symbolic sights) of last 100 years — featured erotic motives in 38 graphic and photographic works of such world-renowned artists as of French impressionist Pierre-August Renoir, Austrian secessionist Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Miroslav Šutej, Shu Takahashi, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann. Exhibited photographers were: avant-garde experimentalist Man Ray, controversial Japanese maestro Nobuyoshi Araki, Helmut Newton, Ralph Gibson, Jeanloup Sieff, the cult of the American photography Nan Goldin, etc. The second part of the exhibition will be exclusively focused on Slovene authors.
In February 2010 Slovene and Croatian curators Petja Grafenauer and Vanja Ženko juxtaposed in the exhibition What's happening? Stereo Exhibition young established artists from both countries without exposing their names with the intention to show the importance of the shows atmosphere, thus to show the global character of contemporary fine arts. The 2010 line-up of solo exhibitions include Slovene artists Duša Jesih, Mitja Ficko, and Roberto Kusterle as well as a group exhibition entitled Wild in Heart featuring Aleksij Kobal, Silvester Plotajs Sicoe, Jurij Kalan and Mirko Bratuša.
Collection
In addition to the programme of exhibitions, in 2000 the Gallery started to build its collection of the artists who had exhibited at the Gallery. The collection's central core is the contemporary painting while at the same time it diversifies into other media, including recent explorations.
Within this broad concept, a central place is occupied by the generation of artists that came of age in the second half of the 1990s and have already been recognized in institutional circles of Slovenian and international contemporary art. Thus the collection is one of the most important ones in Slovenia.
The works from the collection are exhibited occasionally, like in 2008, when the Gallery prepared out of purchased art works the group show entitled the Aesthetics of the New Millennium — Selected Works of Slovene Contemporary Art. The exhibition concentrated on the members of a strong generation of artists who graduated from the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts during the mid-1990s, and have made significant contributions to contemporary Slovenian painting and sculpture: painters Viktor Bernik, Miha Boljka, Uršula Berlot, Arjan Pregl, Miha Štrukelj, and Sašo Vrabič, and the two sculptors, Boštjan Drinovec in Primož Pugelj.
All works of the collection are well documented on the Gallery website.
See also
- Nova Gorica Arts Centre
- Pixxelpoint International Festival of Computer Art
- Slovene National Theatre Nova Gorica
- Goriška Museum
External links
- Nova Gorica City Gallery website (in English)