Kaleidoscope. Artist, Collector, Critic
Connected to one exhibition the Artist – Dragan Stojkov, Collector (s) – Vladimir and Borka Popović and the Critic – Ratomir Kulić point to the kaleidoscope of museum activities where each angle of observation brings a new image and knowledge about the importance and the value of art. There is no art without a painter who creates artworks, there is no purpose if there are no collectors who collect them, and there is no permanence without critics who interpret it and present it to the public. The exhibition is conceived as a unique kaleidoscope through which these three persons intertwine and refract, creating a unique idea of the activities, features and values of the Gallery of Matica Srpska.
ARTIST – Dragan Stojkov
The artist Dragan Stojkov is a long-time friend of the Gallery of Matica Srpska, who has donated his numerous artworks during the previous years. As a painter with a long career, Stojkov went through various phases of his work both in the artistic and thematic sense. Dragan Stojkov’s work recognizes the aspiration towards a timeless image, a universal icon in which space is allegorically displaced. The space of his compositions is inhabited by carefully selected elements in order to build a visual enigmatic narrative of suggestive power. In a common aspiration and in search for adequate answers, as a result of an imagined exhibition, the Gallery og Matica Srpska received a gift-collection of Dragan Stojkov, and thus another important opus of his works of art arrived to the Gallery.
COLLECTOR(S) – Vladimir and Borka Popović
Vladimir and Borka Popović from Belgrade, professors by their vocation, art lovers and art devotees, have been passionately collecting works of art for two and a half decades. Consequently, they own one of the best and most artistically valuable private collections of Serbian art of the 19th and 20th centuries. The collection represents an artistically, culturally and historically extremely valuable and visually rich unity, characterized by the diversity of authors (Uroš Predić, Paja Jovanović, Nadežda Petrović, Sava Šumanović, Ljuba Ivanović, Nedeljko Gvozdenović, Leonid Šejka, Milić od Mačve, Vladimir Dunjić, Milan Tucović, etc.) and authorial conceptions, techniques and themes, as well as a broad chronological framework lasting more than a century.
CRITIC – Ratomir Kulić
The chosen critic is Ratomir Kulić, an art historian, a curator and conservator of the Gallery of Matica Srpska. During four full decades he left a deep mark in the work of this cultural institution with his humanistic approach to museum work. Exhibited as a showpiece, Kulić’s book The Death of Art and the Reanimation of Culture which represents a pholosophic consideration on questions on art and thinking about the esence of an artwork, its muselogical approach and its overall importance for culture, confirms him once again as a broadly educated museum thinker who deeply considers numerous issues on art and museum activities.
Authors of the exhibition and the accompanying publications Kaleidoscope. Artist – Collector – Critic are Tijana Palkovljević Bugarski, PhD, director of the Gallery of Matica Srpska, Snežana Mišić, PhD, museum advisor, Danilo Vuksanović, MA, senior conservator.
The exhibition was organized within the project Novi Sad – European Capital of Culture 2022 and the platform “Kaleidoscope of Culture”.
The realization of the exhibition and accompanying publications was made possible by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia and the Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information and Relations with Religious Communities.
