FO.VI Gallery
History
"The Art Stays Festival and FO.VI Galleries are our family project", said Vladimir Vladimir and Marjana Forbici in the daily newspaper Delo. Initially, in an effort to enrich Ptuj's old town centre with the artistic, gallery life, they established the Tenzor Gallery. At that time, they also founded the Art Stays Cultural Association, which began to organise the Art Stays, International Festival of Contemporary Art in Ptuj. Today, the Art Stays Festival is regarded as the largest Slovenian visual arts festival. "Hundreds of artists from all over the world have been brought to our galleries or to Art Stays Festival", adds Forbici. "We've managed to entangle Ptuj in the world's art network."
In the following years, the Tenzor Gallery moved from Ptuj's city centre to Prešerenova ulica and was renamed the FO.VI Gallery after the son of Vladimir and Marjana Forbici, painter Jernej Forbici, and their daughter-in-law Marika Vicari, who met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Marika Vicari, who is also one of the curators of the FO.VI Gallery, is an Italian artist and curator from Vicenza. Since 2010, FO.VI Gallery is located in Strnišče near Kidričevo. In 2012, it was joined by Exhibitions Space FO.VI 2 in Ptuj.
Programme
The first exhibition at the FO.VI Gallery was the paintings by Dušan Fišer and Jernej Forbici, which represented their view of the so-called "halde", red-mud deposit from decades of bauxite production in the aluminium factory in Kidričevo. Since then, exhibitions in FO.VI Gallery have featured numerous painters, graphic artists and photographers (cf. the list on the website). In addition to the exhibitions Winter Garden – Exploring the MicroPop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art, Open Depots and many others, annual exhibitions also take place in the context of the Art Stays Festival, such as Field of Vision, American Presidents & Sea of Blue, White & Red, Reliquie etc. The FO.VI Gallery also houses a library with 20,000 books and a memorial room with paintings by Jože Tisnikar.
See also
- Art Stays Cultural Association
- Art Stays, International Festival of Contemporary Art
- Art Factory Majšperk