STA, 29 December 2019 - Art lovers will be in for an interesting year as Moderna Galerija, the national museum of modern art, brings some peculiar exhibitions in 2019, including one on visual art in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and another on the Non-Aligned Movement.
The first exhibition will open on 31 January, featuring a review of Slovenian painters born in the 1970s and 1980s.
It will try to give an insight into what painting as a classic medium means today after it underwent some radical revaluation in the 20th century.
Slavko Smolej, The Triglav Northern Wall in the Mist, 1935, Moderna galerija
Visual art in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-1941) will open at the end of April, bringing works by leading artists from the region from the 1930s.
Paintings, statues, prints, drawings, photos and films for the exhibition will be contributed by more than 30 institutions from the region.
The recurring theme will be Yugoslavia as seen by Slovenian-US writer Louis Adamič in the travelogue from 1934 he wrote after visiting his homeland.
Related: Check out out weekly guides to what's on in Ljubljana here
For Adamič (1898-1951), the Yugoslavia of the 1930s was a marginal country of stark contrasts torn between pre-modern customs and capitalism which is nearing an end.
He also depicts it through his meetings with artists and writers such as sculptor Ivan Meštrović or writer Miroslav Krleža, and even King Aleksandar. (More details can be found here.)
The museum will also host the 9th Triennial of Contemporary Art - U3, which will run from 10 October to 2 February 2020.
It will be curated by Prague-based Vit Havranek, who has been project leader of the Tranzit initiative for contemporary art since 2002 and teaches at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague.
A work by Zoran Mušič. Photo: JL Flanner
To mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, the museum will pay tribute to Slovenian painter Zoran Mušič (1909-2005) in September.
His works from the series We Are Not the Last from the 1970s will be put on show together with the drawings he made in the Dachau concentration camp which were discovered in Italy in 2016.
Meanwhile, the Metelkova Museum of Contemporary Art, Moderna Galerija's contemporary art arm, will launch the show Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned in March.
Curated by Bojana Piškur, the exhibition will highlight the ideas, ideals and principles of the movement, particularly in close connection with its cultural policies.
The museum says the exhibition should not be considered a kind of exoticism or nostalgia for the movement.
Instead, it will try to place these policies in a contemporary context of the global economic, political and cultural system. More details on this show can can be found here, while the gallery's two locations are shown below.
