Exhibition "Jovan Kratohvil. Composition 100/24"

Exhibition "JOVAN KRATOHVIL - COMPOSITION 100/24"

National Museum of Serbia November 15, 2024 - January 26, 2025

The retrospective exhibition of Jovan Kratohvil (1924-1998) is organized on the artist's 100th anniversary and a sufficient amount of time since his absence, in order to give a comprehensive overview of his rich and diverse artistic opus for the first time.

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

The exhibition setup Jovan Kratohvil - Composition 100/24 brings together his most significant works from all creative phases, created between the 1940s and the 1980s. Starting from partisan art and socialist realism art, through the journey towards abstract expression within socialist aesthetics and modernism, through explorations of work in different materials, all the way to pioneering achievements in sculptures made of transparent polyester.

The exhibition author, Lidija Ham Milovanović, curator of the Collection of Yugoslav Sculpture at the National Museum of Serbia, has selected a total of 100 exhibits, with sculpture being dominant. Additionally, Kratohvil's paintings, prints, and drawings are presented, along with documentary exhibits about public monuments. Considering that Jovan Kratohvil often named his works Composition followed by a sequential number in the year of creation, the exhibition setup, as a new spatial composition, carries a name that follows the artist's practice.

The selected material is mostly owned by the Kratohvil family, and besides works from the National Museum of Serbia, the setup 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 in Zrenjanin, the 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 have marked his creative phases from the beginnings to works that we believe represent the latest, simultaneously most inventive outcomes of his artistic quest.