Restoration of Serbian art after 1950: Belgrade group, Group 57, artists outside groups, from the collection of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin

The exhibition explores and values ​​the works of painters and sculptors created around 1950, who maintain the artistic vocabulary adopted between the two world wars, without participating actively in more advanced artistic ideas of their time propagated by artists gathered in art groups such as "Eleven" and "December group". Gathered within "Belgrade Group", "Group 57" or acting outside groups, the work of these artists does not signify a revival but represents the restoration of the modernist principles of the interwar Serbian art after the Second World War. The exhibition also deals with paintings and sculptures, kept in the collection of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin, by the following painters: Milan Kečić, Olivera Kangrga, Majda Kurnik, Ksenija Divjak, Đorđe Bošan, Radenko Mišević, Milun Mitrović, Boško Petrović, Bogomil Karlavaris, Dragoslav Stojanović Sip and sculptors: Angelina Gatalica, Nikola Janković and Matija Vuković. By participating in Art Colony Ečka, from the mid-1950s and the 1960s, these artists influenced the formation of artistic attitudes and the appearance of the modernist artistic language in the local environment.

For the collection of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin, the fact that these artists left the works in the collection, which were mostly created during their stay in the Ečka Art Colony is of great importance. For the collection of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin, the presented works have not only an artistic but also a wider cultural and documentary value, as a testimony of a time in which these works were created.  At the same time, besides the document of one period and society, through the works from the collection of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin, we also get a document of a certain place, the very Art Colony in Ečka, seen through the artists’ vision from the mid-fifties of the last century to the present. For this reason, these works have significance for Contemporary Gallery of Zrenjanin as a document of an organization and institution such as Ečka Art Colony and can serve as a material for the fuller study and overview of Serbian art of the second half of the 20th century.