FO.VI Gallery
History
“Art Stays Festival and FO.VI Galleries are our family project”, said Vladimir Vladimir and Marjana Forbici for the daily newspaper Delo. Initially, in an effort to enrich Ptuj’s old town centre with the artistic, gallery life, they established a Tenzor Gallery. At that time they also founded the Art Stays Cultural Association, which began to organize 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 managed to entangle Ptuj in world’s art network”.
In the following years, Tenzor Gallery moved from Ptuj’s city centre to Prešerenova Street and was renamed into the FO.VI Gallery. It was named 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 a gallery 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 that have been taking place in FO.VI gallery premises, featured numerous painters, graphic artists and photographers (cf. the list on the website). Exhibitions Winter Garden – Exploring the MicroPop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art, Open Depotsand many others were held, and annually 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.