Exhibition 'Jovan Kratokhvil. Composition 100/24'

The National Museum of Serbia 15 November 2024 - 26 January 2025.

Retrospective exhibition of Jovan Kratokhvil (1924-1998) is organized on the occasion of the artist's 100th birthday and a sufficient time of his absence, in order to comprehensively review this rich and diverse artistic opus for the first time.

The National Museum of Serbia opens the exhibition on Friday, 15 November at 18:00 with the belief that only through the exhibition can there be a true opportunity for direct encounter, experience, understanding, reconsideration, summarization, and possible repositioning of Jovan Kratokhvil's artistic legacy.

The exhibition layout Jovan Kratokhvil - Composition 100/24 for the first time unites his most significant works from all creative phases, created from the 1940s to the 1980s. Starting from partisan art and socialist realism art, through the path to abstract expression within socialist aesthetics and modernism, through explorations of work in various materials, all the way to pioneering achievements of sculptures made in transparent polyester.

The exhibition curator, Lidija Ham Milovanović, curator of the Yugoslav Sculpture Collection at the National Museum of Serbia, has selected a total of 100 exhibits, among which sculpture is dominant. Also presented are Kratokhvil's paintings, graphics, and drawings, along with documentary exhibits on public monuments. Bearing in mind that Jovan Kratokhvil often referred to his works as Composition with an appended serial number in the year of creation, the exhibition installation, as a new spatial composition, carries a name that aligns with the artist's practice.

The selected material is largely owned by the Kratokhvil family, and in addition to works from the National Museum of Serbia, the exhibition includes works from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the Museum of Yugoslavia, the Faculty of Fine Arts, the National Museum of Šumadija in Kragujevac, the Contemporary Gallery from Zrenjanin, Muzej Zepter, as well as three works in private ownership. The selection of exhibits includes Kratokhvil's emblematic works, as well as a selection of achievements that marked his creative phases from the beginnings to works that we believe represent the last, simultaneously the most inventive culminations of his artistic explorations.