Three years after Tisnikar’s tragic death in a road accident, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška organized the first in a series of exhibitions called “Homage to Tisnikar”. For a large exhibition at the Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin in 2001, the master painter’s works were combined with the works of Mirsad Begić, one of the most renowned Slovenian contemporary sculptors. This dialogue between the emphatically existential creativity of the sculptor and the self-taught “painter of death” was so powerful and fascinating that already the next year, the City Municipality of Slovenj Gradec commissioned the creation of a memorial to the most important and recognizable artist from Slovenj Gradec. The two-part bronze monument was unveiled in 2003 in front of the building of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška at Glavni trg in Slovenj Gradec. Along with the painter’s portrait, it also includes an expressively designed composition of a wagon, which Tisnikar uses to symbolically transport the souls of the deceased to the afterlife, just as he did during his unusual employment as a mortician’s assistant at the Slovenj Gradec hospital’s mortuary. During the conception of the monument, Mirsad Begić also created a series of small clay models, so-called bozzetti (some were also cast in bronze), which he used to illustrate his study process; they are kept in the collections of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška.

Text: Marko Košan