Like the Collection of Sculpture and the Collection of Paintings, the Collection of Drawings, Graphics, Prints and Art on Paper includes materials since the early 20th and numbers 6360 artworks.
From the first half of the 20th century, the drawings of Miroslav Kraljević and Milan Steiner, as well as the Expressionist graphic art of Sergij Glumac are particularly noteworthy. The collection also includes some rare avant-garde publications, such as the Dadaist Die Kathedrale by Kurt Schwitters and the uncensored edition of Dada Tank.
After 1950, artistic events in Croatia were marked by the activity of EXAT 51 and the Collection includes a number of drawings and drafts by the members of this group. Designs by future members Ivan Picelj, Aleksandar Srnec, and Vjenceslav Richter for the Yugoslav pavilions at the fairs in Stockholm, Vienna, and Hannover (1949-1950) are especially valuable.
Work of the international art movement New Tendencies forms the constructivist part of the collection. Among the Croatian authors, the graphic art portfolios of Juraj Dobrović and mobile graphics by Miroslav Šutej are especially notable, while the international section includes artists such as Getulio Alviani, Alberto Biasi, Max Bill, Piero Dorazio, Julio Le Parc, Richard Mortensen, Otto Piene, Jesus Raphael Soto, and Victor Vasarely. Almost simultaneously, artistic activity in Zagreb was marked by the proto-conceptual group Gorgona, which had a considerable impact on the later development of conceptual art in Croatia and other regions of former Yugoslavia. Eleven issues of the anti-journal Gorgona can be understood as a brief survey of the group's artistic activity and its cooperation with comparable artists abroad.
As for the first generation of conceptual artists involved in the New Artistic Practice in Croatia during the 1970s, one should especially emphasize the artworks on paper, drawings, collages, and art books of Tomislav Gotovac, Dalibor Martinis, Sanja Iveković, Mladen Stilinović, Goran Trbuljak, Vlado Martek, and Marijan Molnar. In the collection, among other things, there are works of famous conceptual artists such as Anette Messager, Balint Szomathhy, Jan Dibbets, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schnemman, Joseph Beuys. An important segment of collection makes more than a thousand drawings and twenty albums with experiments, drawings and interventions of Antuna Motika.
A separate section contains the poster collection, which comprises mainly Croatian posters from the 1960s until the present day, including those made by Ivan Picelj and published for exhibitions at the MSU from 1956-1983. For the poster series by Ivan Picelj and Mihajlo Arsovski, the Gallery was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Poster Exhibition at Varese (Italy) in 1972. Apart from Picelj, a number of artists have contributed to the visual identity of MSU, with their posters forming part of the present-day collection, such as Mihajlo Arsovski, Dalibor Martinis, Dubravka Rakoci, Boris Bućan, and Igor Kuduz. In addition to the poster cycle of Ivan Picelj, the collection now includes the oeuvre of Boris Bućan, Mihajlo Arsovski i Boris Ljubičić.
Of the foreign authors represented in the Poster Collection stands out the poster donation of the celebrated American designer Milton Glaser.
Contact:
Collection manager: Kristina Bonjeković Stojković, senior curator kristina.bonjekovic@msu.hr
