The collection of Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter is located at 38 Vrhovac in a one-story family villa built by Vjenceslav Richter according to his own design at the end of the 1950s.
On 30 December 1980, Vjenceslav Richter and his wife Nada Kareš Richter donated to the City of Zagreb the artworks and a family house located in the western, residential part of the city, about a thirty-minute walk from the city centre. The donors’ idea was to extend cultural content beyond the city centre and enrich the cultural offer of the city of Zagreb, with a special emphasis on working with young artists and especially the local community.
Over time, Vjenceslav Richter and his wife expanded the donation with new works of art and archival material, so from the original 27 works of art donated in 1980, the collection has expanded to include 188 works of art created between 1963 and 2002, and an extremely valuable archive and library. The Museum of Contemporary Art has managed the collection since 1998. The collection was opened to the public in 2000 and is an example of a successful collaboration between artists and an institution in which the ground floor of the family house and the attached park were converted into a public museum space. Here, the artworks by Vjenceslav Richter are exhibited in the interior and exterior spaces. In 2011, the collection of artworks was inscribed on the Register of Cultural Property of the Republic of Croatia.
Vjenceslav Richter (Omilje, 1917 - Zagreb, 2002) was one of the key figures of the Croatian art scene of the second half of the 20th century, whose architectural and artistic creativity occupies a significant place in European art history. He was one of the founders of the EXAT 51 group, and his entire creative activity focused on establishing a balance between the scientific and the spiritual and thereby enabling the creation of new scientific and philosophical paradigms. In the 1950s and 1960s, he realized a series of successful exhibition pavilion projects - in Brussels, Turin and Milan, which earned him international recognition. He worked on museum building projects such as the Museum for Spatial Exhibits, the Museum of Evolution in Krapina, the Museum of the Revolution of the People of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, and the Archaeological Museum in Aleppo. He is the author of Villa Zagorje, today the Office of the President of the Republic of Croatia, Saponija Factory in Osijek, and in the early sixties he initiated one of the most original projects, Sinturbanism, which he further developed in the theoretical project of Heliopolis, a four-dimensional city of a million people.
Due to experimentation in the field of visual arts, he came in contact with the international movement New Tendencies. During this period, he created the series of works Centre, Centrije and Centrijade, Systemic Sculptures, Reliefmeters, Systemic Prints and Spatial Prints, which stem from Richter's fascination with systems and preoccupation with the idea of the possibility of synthesis in the fields of architecture and visual arts. The series of works in which Richter moves away from the solid geometric structure; Spontaneous Drawing, Spontaneous Print, Free Drawing and Gravitational Drawing were created in the late seventies, and especially in the eighties and nineties of the 20th century.
Richter has written numerous theoretical texts on synthetic approaches in architecture, urbanism and art, by which he laid the theoretical and scientific foundations for his projects based on an interdisciplinary approach. From 1953 to 1958, he was the president of the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts, he participated in the founding of the Studio for Industrial Design, and from 1963 to 1967, and he managed the Centre for Industrial Design. He was a correspondent for the L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui journal, launched by André Bloc in 1930, and from 1958 to 1961, he was the editor-in-chief of the Man and Space journal. He received numerous awards and recognitions in the country and abroad, including the Herder Prize and the Viktor Kovačić and Vladimir Nazor Awards for Lifetime Achievement.
Visitor information:
Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection, Vrhovec 38, Zagreb
Tel: 01/60 52 700; 01/ 37 04 892
Working hours: Wednesday and Saturday 11 am - 4 pm
(other days upon prior notice)
Contact:
Vesna Meštrić, head of collection, vesna.mestric@msu.hr
