Nova Gorica City Gallery
History
Founded within the premises of the Slovene National Theatre (SNG) Nova Gorica and initially operating under the auspices of the Goriška Museum, the management of the Nova Gorica City Gallery was in 2000 transferred to the Nova Gorica Arts Centre.
Programme and mission
Beside the organisation of the Pixxelpoint International Festival of Computer Art, the Nova Gorica City Gallery featured annual up to 10 exhibitions prepared by house and very often by guest curators of national and sometimes international origins. Solo and group exhibitions are focused on all genres of contemporary art; projects are selected according to their quality, their originality of ideas, and their achievements in relation to contemporary art movements. The gallery tends to present a complex, quality-based view of the Slovene and foreign artistic production, as well it pays attention to artists from the area of Nova Gorica.
Exhibitions
The year 2008 saw a rich programme of solo exhibitions by middle generation of Slovene artists as Aleksij Kobal, Lujo Vodopivec, and Bojan Štokelj. The multimedia exhibition entitled Data Collision featured beside the work of young and internationaly renowned art collective BridA and postgravity world known artist Dragan Živadinov also two international names (Hans H. Diebner, Florian Grond).
In 2009, the group exhibition Eros Kalos curated by Brane Kovič featured erotic motives in 38 graphic and photographic works of such world-renowned artists as Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, André Masson, Helmut Newton, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray – Emmanuel Rudnitsky, Pierre-Auguste Renior, Egon Schiele, Jeanloup Sieff, Miroslav Šutej, Shu Takahashi, Sam Taylor-Wood, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann.
In february 2010 Slovene and Croatian curators Petja Grafenauer and Vanja Ženko juxtaposed in the exhibition What's happening? Stereo Exhibition. young etablished artists from both coutries without exposing their names with the intention to show the importance of the shows athmosphere, thus to show the global charachter of contemporary fine arts. The 2010 line-up of solo exhibitions include Slovene artists Duša Jesih, Mitja Ficko, and Roberto Kusterle as well as a group exhibition entitled Wild in Heart featuring Aleksij Kobal, Silvester Plotajs Sicoe, Jurij Kalan and Mirko Bratuša.
Collection
In addition to the programme of exhibitions, in 2000 the Gallery started to build its collection of especially Slovenian, but also foreign artists who had exhibited at the gallery. The concept behind the collection is in large part derived from the exhibition programme. Its central core is of contemporary painting while at the same time it diversify into other media, including recent explorations.
Within this broad concept, a central place is occupied by the generation of artists that came of age in the second half of the 1990s and have already been recognized in institutional circles of Slovenian and international contemporary art. The collection’s centre of gravity therefore is contemporary Slovenian artists whose works provides an authentic and convincing visual narrative of the time in which it emerged. Thus the Collection of City Gallery Nova Gorica represents one of the most important collections (particularly of paintings) in Slovenia.
The works from the collection are exhibited occasionaly, like in 2008, when the Gallery prepared out of purchased art works the group show entitled the Aesthetics of the New Millennium — Selected Works of Slovenian Contemporary Art. The exhibition concentrated on the members of a strong generation of artists who graduated from the Ljubljana Academy of Visual Arts during the mid-1990s, and have made significant contributions to contemporary Slovenian painting and sculpture: painters Viktor Bernik, Miha Boljka, Uršula Berlot, Arjan Pregl, Miha Štrukelj, and Sašo Vrabič, and the two sculptors, Boštjan Drinovec in Primož Pugelj.
All works of the collection are well documented on the Gallery webpage.
Other activities
As well as mounting exhibitions, Nova Gorica City Gallery is the site of various talks on contemporary visual arts, fine arts workshops for children, and guided exhibition tours for the public.
See also
- Nova Gorica Arts Centre
- Pixxelpoint International Festival of Computer Art
- Slovene National Theatre (SNG) Nova Gorica
- Goriška Museum