Exhibition "Jovan Kratohvil. Composition 100/24"

Exhibition "JOVAN KRATOHVIL – COMPOSITION 100/24"

National Museum of Serbia

November 15, 2024 - January 26, 2025.

A retrospective exhibition of Jovan Kratohvil (1924 - 1998) is organized on the one hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth and sufficiently after his absence, so that this rich and diverse artistic oeuvre can be seen as a whole for the first time.

The National Museum of Serbia will open the exhibition on Friday, November 15 at 6 PM, with the belief that only the exhibition is a true opportunity for direct encounter, experience, understanding, re-examination, summarization, and possible repositioning of Jovan Kratohvil's artistic legacy.

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

The author of the exhibition, Lidija Ham Milovanović, curator of the Collection of Yugoslav Sculpture at the National Museum of Serbia, selected a total of 100 exhibits, among which sculpture is dominant. Kratohvil's paintings, graphics, and drawings are also presented, along with documentary exhibits about public monuments.

Considering that Jovan Kratohvil often named his works Composition with an added ordinal number in the year of creation, the exhibition setup as a new spatial composition carried a title that builds on the artist's practice.

The selected material is mostly owned by the Kratohvil family, and alongside works from the National Museum of Serbia, the setup includes works from:

• Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade
• Museum of Yugoslavia
• Faculty of Fine Arts
• National Museum of Šumadija in Kragujevac
• Contemporary Gallery from Zrenjanin
• Zepter Museum
• as well as three works in private ownership.

The selection of exhibits includes Kratohvil'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 latest, simultaneously the most inventive outcomes of his artistic quests.