In 1986, the
National Gallery of Slovenia took over the custody of the Government Art
Collection from the Executive Council of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.
The collection holds more than one thousand three hundred works of art, which
are distributed in state protocol buildings, ministries, and government
offices, whereas part of them are incorporated in the permanent collection of
the National Gallery of Slovenia. The Government Art Collection is incredibly rich
and varied. Its core was devised by Ban Marko Natlačen in 1938, when acquired
works of art were presented in the provincial palace. Paintings and art prints
present a great majority of the collection; however, it also holds sculptures
by thirty-seven artists from different periods, ranging from the seventeenth
century to the abstraction of the nineteen-sixties. Most sculptures date from
the thirties to the sixties of the previous century. Despite prolific
sculptural activity during the formation of the collection, sculptural works
constitute only fifteen per cent of it. The vast majority of sculptural tasks
were determined by commissions of propagandistic public monuments. Also,
sculpture was technically more challenging and more expensive than painting.
Acquisitions for the large Government Art Collection were sporadic, guided by
the desire to decorate rooms, without a balanced overview or planning, making
its composition very diverse.
Sculpture before the Second World War upheld the
tradition of Vienna-trained sculptors and was dependent on modest commissions
of small-scale works. The war arrested the development and Slovene sculpture of
the early nineteen-forties maintained clear volume and solid forms of the
pre-war classicistic design. The war limited outside influences and the
sculptural activity in general, whereas the post-war sculpture underwent
intense regeneration based on the pre-war stylistic achievements. Changing
societal relations and the ideological cultural policies during the years of building
the new motherland placed the function of a sculptor on different foundations.
The Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana was established
in 1945. Its first professors of sculpture were Boris Kalin, Frančišek Smerdu,
Zdenko Kalin, Peter Loboda and Karel Putrih, all of whom guided their students
towards realist sculpture, since the realist tradition gained recognition in
the struggle for a new, revolutionary subject matter. The post-war period
proved favourable to the development of large monuments and through them the
sculptors participated in the societal renewal in the spirit of labour and
reconstruction. Monuments to the National Liberation Struggle expressed the
ideology of the new socialist society and by 1953 transformed the image of fine
arts. Academy professors and Lojze Dolinar were the most compelling
representatives of monumental sculpture, while younger graduates established
themselves at the end of the nineteen-fifties. The sixties' generation, best
represented by Jakob Savinšek, Stojan Batič, Drago Tršar and Janez Boljka,
contributed to a new metamorphosis of Slovenian sculpture.
The exhibition Art
for the Brave New World. Sculptures
from the Government Art Collection presents a selection of pieces from the
diverse and unbalanced whole, and at the same time provides an insight into the
expressive subject matter of sculptural production of artists, such as Jakob
Savinšek, Zdenko Kalin, Boris Kalin, Karel Putrih, Stojan Batič, Tone Lapajne,
Ivan Štrekelj, Janez Pirnat, Drago Tršar, Lojze Dolinar, Janez Lenassi,
Frančišek Smerdu, France Kralj, Ivan Napotnik, Janez Boljka, Aladar Zahariaš,
Vladimir Štoviček, and others.
The sculptural
part of the collection is at the exhibition in the Museum of Dolenjska in Novo
mesto presented by twenty-eight works of art by seventeen artists; the works
were chosen according to aesthetic, stylistic, and quality criteria.
Author of the exhibition
Mateja Breščak
Coordination
Katarina Dajčman
Exhibition visual design
Ranko Novak
Exhibition set-up
Maja Rudolf Markovič
Conservation-restoration of sculptures
Martina Vuga
The project is supported by