The exhibition ‘The Magic of Art’, which can count on the High Patronage of the President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor and is organised in collaboration with the Azienda speciale Villa Manin, will occupy the two floors of the east exedra of Villa Manin di Passariano from 12 April to 22 June 2014.
The exhibition includes the works of the generations of painters, sculptors, graphic artists and photographers who contributed to shaping the culture in the common national spaces of the former Yugoslavia. The choice fell on the specificity of the modernist practice of the 1970s and 1980s, both of individual authors and groups attentive to the phenomena of new expressive figuration and neo-constructivism.
The entry into postmodernism in the late 1980s and early 1990s is characterised by the retroavantgarde and a highly individualised authorial poetics prevailing in the new, pictorially rich national space of Slovenia in the last twenty years.
The exhibition, curated by Aleksander Bassin, stems from the desire to follow the artistic events in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia, starting from 1968, a year of lively ferment also from an artistic point of view and characterised by a desire to create a new way of making art Slovenian artists of previous generations were already present in various exhibitions in Italy after World War II, including Group 69, presented by the director of the Modern Gallery and secretary general of the International Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, Zoran Kržišnik.
The organisers’ intention is to present a comprehensive exhibition: among the selected artists, whose works come from public and private collections or directly from the authors, there are 51 painters, 17 sculptors, 6 graphic designers and 19 photographers on display. In addition to their works, chronologically divided into decades, there is also an ‘exhibition within an exhibition’ entitled ‘Landscape as a thematic concern in Slovenian painting and photography’. This exhibition represents a singular and convincing Slovenian characteristic in the appearance – at the beginning of the last century – of the four greats of Slovenian impressionism: Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matija Jama and Matej Sternen. And Škofja Loka, the old mediaeval town, then became a true Slovenian Barbizon, from which the names and works of the future painters featured in this ‘exhibition within an exhibition’ also often derive.
