SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS, THE HERITAGE HOUSE AND THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF VOJVODINA HAVE THE HONOR OF INVITING YOU TO THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION

OLGA JEVRIĆ– COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE

Friday, April  7^th, 2023 at 7 p.m.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART VOJVODINA
Dunavska 37, Novi sad

Duration: April 7^th – May 7^th 2023

Authors and curators of the exhibition: Žaklina Marković (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and  Dejan Vučetić (the Heritage House)

Curator from MoCAV: Suzana Vuksanović

Owing to her creative vision, the sculptor, academician and legator who boldly introduced novelties in the sculptural practice of the then Serbian and Yugoslav art scene, had already in the 1950s stepped uncompromisingly into the world of pure abstract forms and shapes. With a strong wish to build her own visual-plastic language and to exercise the right to self-expression, Olga Jevrić had very early broken with the ruling artistic trends of sоcalist-realism and established academicism in the art of post-World War II Yugoslavia.

As early as at the beginning of her career, Olga Jevrić held one of the most significant exhibitions of sculpture in the domain of the then Yugoslavia – Spatial Compositions – in the Gallery of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) at Terazije in Belgrade in 1957, where she displayed her artworks from the series Compositions and Proposals for Monuments. This exhibition laid the foundation of the artist’s aesthetics that rested on the “syntax” of plastic elements of mass, with space as a negative volume, and a system of metal rods. Even though the artist developed and transformed this model in the decades that followed, it never lost its essence established in the 1950s. The innovativeness of Olga Jevrić’s work is also reflected in the introduction of non-standard materials such as ferric oxide, cement and iron, which became a recognizable element of her authentic sculptural expression.

Portrait of Olga Jančić, 1953

The interest in Olga Jevrić’s oeuvre shows no signs of abating, which is indicated by the fact that her nine sculptures became part of London’s Tate Modern collection in 2019. Her works are housed at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) in Belgrade, the Heritage House, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Museum of the City of Belgrade, the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, the Zepter Museum in Belgrade, Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, the Terra Museum in Kikinda, the National Museum in Kragujevac, the Contemporary Gallery in Zrenjanin, the Museum of Srem in Sremska Mitrovica, the City Museum in Subotica, the Modern Gallery in Gornji Milanovac, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Rijeka, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Murska Sobota, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tate Modern in London, the New National Gallery in Berlin, as well as in private collections in Serbia, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, the USA, and others.

The exhibition Olga Jevrić – Composition and Structure, showcased in the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts at the end of 2022, commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the artist’s birth, as a homage to one of the most remarkable Serbian sculptors, is on display in a carefully selected array of works to the audience of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad.

Olga Jevrić marked the second half of the last century with her avant-garde creativity, her pursuits and endeavours within the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and with her selfless donations of two large legacies to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and to the Heritage House in Belgrade, respectively. The collections from these two legacies — rounded series of works from all stages of Olga Jevrić’s career.

The small, medium and large format sculptures illustrate a prolific creative path spanning more than five decades, wherein Olga Jevrić’s expression evolved through cycles of portraits, nudes, reliefs, proposals for monuments, complementary forms, articulations of space, aggressive forms, divergent movements, sequences, encompassed spaces, spaces in habitats, exostructures, layerings, enumerations, intersections and others. The artworks on display are presented chronologically and an emphasis has been placed on the so-called cycles, aka “families”, as Olga Jevrić herself used to call them, in order to get them closer to the audience and to offer a clearer view at the development course of the artist’s sculptural thought and the established principles of the construction of her sculpture, along with the distinctively shaped language of the form.

The project is patroned by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia,  the Secretariat for Culture of the City of Belgrade and the Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information and Relations with Religious Communities.