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THE
PERMANENT
DISPLAY
The authentic settings of what used to be the artist’s home
and atelier houses Ivan Mestrovic’s works from the Mestrovic
Atelier holdings: marble, stone, wood, and bronze sculptures,
reliefs, drawings, and graphics.
The items exhibited represent Mestrovic’s artistic work during
the first four decades of his artistic life. The feature common
to them all is Mestrovic’s typical focusing on human figure
represented through a wide range of themes, the most significant
being portraits, the mother and child theme (both lay and
sacral), female nudes, religious and mythological themes,
and monuments of historic figures. Stylistic features of individual
exhibits are consistent with certain periods of Mestrovic’s
artistic creation, ranging from the early impressionist and
symbolist works or secessionist stylised works of the first
decade, through expressionist and mythic depicting of religious
subjects or refined and idealised female portraits dating
from the First World War, to his return to classic values
in the third and the forth decade of his artistic life.
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The concept of the display is consistent with
the very character of the museum and its essential quality is
functional and contextual respect of space, which excludes the
usual chronological, stylistic, or thematic grouping principles.
The aim of the atrium, atelier, and yard design (1962/1963),
produced by the engineer of architecture Miroslav Begovic, was
to create a modern exhibition space which would primarily emphasize
the exhibited sculptures and only to a lesser extent the authenticity
of what used to be Mestrovic’s working area. The project won
the City of Zagreb Prize in 1963. Adaptation and decoration
of the living area (1968/1969), planned by the engineer of architecture
Vojtjeh Delfin, tried to preserve as much as possible of the
original appearance and atmosphere of the artist’s home, paying
special attention to the settings. The authors of the permanent
display are the academically trained painter Edo Kovacevic (atrium,
atelier, and yard) and the engineer of architecture Vojtjeh
Delfin (the living area). The works were selected by Vesna Barbic,
the curator and head of the Mestrovic Atelier between 1960 and
1988. |
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