The permanent collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška is presented in a refreshed display. The display features selected works by Jože Tisnikar, Bogdan Borčić, Štefan Planinc and Pino Poggi, together with a selection from the Homage to Tisnikar collection, which comprises works by Slovenian and international artists whose artistic approaches are closely related to Tisnikar’s. Also on display are works by selected artists associated with Carinthia: Franc Berhtold, Gustav Gnamuš, Andrej Grošelj, Peter Hergold, Štefan Marflak, Luka Popič, Tjaša Rener, Naca Rojnik and Sašo Vrabič.

The display is updated several times a year.

>> Curated by: Katarina Hergold Germ, Marko Košan, and Jernej Kožar

Jože Tisnikar’s (1928–1998) life came to a tragic end in a road accident in 1998, just as he was enjoying the greatest triumph of his artistic career with a major retrospective marking his 70th birthday at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec. His singular inimitable artistic vision—a poignant exploration of the ultimate truths of human existence—has remained an inexhaustible source of inspiration for new projects centred on one of the Museum’s principal collections, Homage to Tisnikar. Conceived by the art historian and then Director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, Milena Zlatar, the collection honours the great painter through works by Slovenian and international artists whose artistic approaches resonate with his own. In addition to a selection of Tisnikar’s works, the current display features paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures by Valentin Oman, Hermann Falke, Tina Dobrajc, Natalija Šeruga Golob, Vladimir Veličković, Herman Pivk, Tihomir Pinter, Metod Frlic and Mirsad Begić.

Bogdan Borčić (1926–2014) was one of the most important painters and printmakers in Slovenia and beyond during the second half of the twentieth century. A recipient of the Prešeren Award for Lifetime Achievement and an Honorary Citizen of the Urban Municipality of Slovenj Gradec, he left behind an extensive body of work distinguished by its remarkable consistency, spirit of enquiry and ability to uncover poetry in everyday objects. The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška began building its collection of Borčić’s works through acquisitions at the end of the twentieth century. In 2003, the artist donated 40 paintings to the Museum, followed by a further ten in 2006. After his death, his family donated part of his estate, and the collection now comprises 321 works: 306 paintings, ten prints and five sculptures.
Borčić’s artistic development is rooted in the modernist dialogue between figuration and abstraction. Over the decades, his artistic vision evolved through a continual movement between representation and the deconstruction of the image, culminating in radical abstraction before returning to a mimetic mode of painting that characterises his later work after 2003. During this period, he gradually abandoned the modernist construction of the picture plane, a shift first evident in the print series Simple Things.
This ambivalent relationship to the image is already apparent in works from the 1960s, when he gradually abandoned mimetic representation in favour of a minimalist approach. After 2007, everyday objects began to appear in his paintings, attached directly to the surface: ropes, padlocks, tins, cloths, nets, pipes, computer components, stones, paintbrushes, dominoes, playing cards, dice and other items. He employed them primarily as compositional elements and only occasionally as signs. Some of these objects also crossed into the realm of three-dimensional form, becoming independent sculptures, such as a paintbrush suspended inside a Plexiglass box.

Štefan Planinc
Despite his extensive oeuvre of book illustrations, which he started to create immediately after finishing his studies at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, Štefan Planinc (1925–2017) is recognized as the most consistent representative of surrealist painting in Slovenia. His motifs are taken either from the subconscious world, fantasies or dreams; usually, his works depict almost hyperrealist representations of real objects in unusual interrelations. Among his most renowned are the series Proto-World, Roads and Zoon politikon.
In 2005, Planinc donated a substantial portion of his extensive creative oeuvre to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec. It encompassed paintings and works on paper created during the period from 1958 until 2003. The donation contained as many as 603 artworks, of which there were 134 large- and medium-scale paintings on canvas, 274 works on paper and 195 original book illustrations.
The current selection features the Still Lifes series, painted in 1977, together with works from the so-called Spanish Cycle (1987–1990).

Pino Poggi was born in 1939 in Genoa. He began his artistic carrier in his grandfather’s stonemasonry workshop, later studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts there, where he subsequently also taught. Between 1965 and 1967 he lived in Maribor, where for a time he shared a studio with Slavko Tihec in Ruše. Since 2000 he has been living and working between Sicily, where he has a studio near Arigona (AU landscape), and Germany. In the mid-1960s, Pino Poggi marked the emergence of Arte Utile with two manifestos, encompassing the AU process, environment, sculptures, furniture (design), artist’s books, poetry, essays, performances, film, and other forms. He later expanded this concept into social aesthetics with two further manifestos (1980 and 1994), which describe art as a responsible force in society, capable of changing the world. Social art critiques consumerism and capitalism, environmental pollution, and imperialism: wars and armament. Social aesthetics is an artistic direction that is not defined stylistically; rather, its meaning must be sought in the content of the artworks, which are connected to the sociological issues of society. Works of social aesthetics analyze the acute nodes of society and its unhealed wounds. Social art has nothing in common with socialist realism. Pino Poggi has been exhibiting in Slovenia since the late 1960s. Besides certain sculptures by Slavko Tihec that show Poggi’s direct influence, his impact on Slovenian art is reflected above all in the work of several younger artists. The international exhibition “For a Better World” at the Art Pavilion in Slovenj Gradec in 1979 took its name from the title of his 1968 work. Pino Poggi is also the author of the sculpture S, which was erected in Slovenj Gradec in 1969.
As part of the research into Pino Poggi’s work, a collaboration is underway with raum AU, with whom we organize the artistic residency “Journey through AU”. The research residency is dedicated to the interdisciplinary exploration and study of Poggi’s extensive and complex body of work. Through it, we are introducing a new museum-gallery-curatorial-artistic approach, aimed at reviving interest — among both professional and general audiences — in Arte Utile and social aesthetics.

Selected Works by Artists from Carinthia from the KGLU Permanent Collection
The presented selection establishes a dialogue between different generations of artists and diverse visual languages from the second half of the twentieth century and the present day.
The exhibition is structured around two thematic emphases. The opening section is shaped by the motif of water in its various visual and symbolic forms. From Sašo Vrabič’s underwater scene and Peter Hergold’s light-filled depiction of the water’s surface, the motif gradually shifts, through the intimate bathroom setting of Tjaša Rener’s work and Franc Berhtold’s associative and increasingly abstract imagery, into the realm of abstract visual expression.
Positioned between these two sections, Naca Rojnik’s stylised female torso and Andrej Grošelj’s abstracted girl’s head serve as a transition between a recognisable world of imagery and Štefan Marflak’s abstract landscape, before leading to Gustav Gnamuš and Luka Popič’s explorations of the possibilities of abstract expression.
This exhibition brings together a range of artistic approaches and modes of representation, from recognisable imagery and corporeality to associative, reduced and abstract forms of visual expression.