This year, the City Municipality of Slovenj Gradec, in cooperation with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, is organizing already the 26th competition for original children’s artistic and literary works, to which nearly 1.000 children from different Slovenian schools and kindergartens applied. The children created works related to three topics: The Past and the Present (within the European Year of Cultural Heritage), The Way to School, and Tisnikar and Koki the Little Raven (on the 20th anniversary of death and the 90th anniversary of birth of the painter Jože Tisnikar). The expert committee, whose members were Leon Ravlan (the educational curator of the KGLU), Katarina Hergold Germ (curator of the KGLU) and Stojan Brezočnik (art teacher and artist), selected 465 works that will be presented at the exhibition. The children most often chose the topic of Tisnikar and Koki the Little Raven, but the other two categories were also represented well. The criteria that the committee considered when selecting the works were: their appropriateness to one of the topics, the strength of their messages, the originality of the motifs and their technical accomplishment. The prevailing techniques among the received works were tempera, collage and combined techniques, and especially in the latter category, the children displayed a great amount of innovation and careful consideration, as they often took on more demanding themes as well, such as various forms of human hardship, transience, scarcity …
The children’s works will be exhibited from 21 September to 21 October in the ground floor rooms of the Carinthian Regional Museum and in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška. At the exhibition opening, an award ceremony will also take place, during which the 10 best works will be declared.