MISCELLANEA: STORIES AND ARTWORKS FROM THE PIRAN COASTAL GALLERIES DEPOTS

The exhibition focuses on that activity of the gallery which is not usually of great interest to the public, but is one of its primary tasks: sorting the museum’s objects into collections. In the case of an art gallery like the Piran Coastal Galleries, it is about contemporary art collections, the way in which the artworks were acquired, how they are kept, but also about the interesting stories and anecdotes that accompany the collecting commitment in the institutions of contemporary visual art.

The collections of the Coastal Galleries of Piran were initially created as a result of a lively exhibition programme, donations and occasional finds. Gradually, however, in accordance with the mission and collection policy of the institution, the collection gained firmer programme foundations. Curators and directors are responsible for supplementing the collections. They follow artists, phenomena, trends and styles according to their own professional judgment, with rich professional experience, but also with a great deal of passion and good knowledge of past and current events.

The profile of the stored collections is created through a critical perspective of curatorial strategies, which are implemented through on-the-spot purchases, exchanges, but also donations from artists, collectors and lovers of contemporary art.

In the collections of the coastal galleries, we can find works by Slovenian and foreign authors, with an emphasis on the artists from the coast. The artistic fund reflects the broad spectrum of human creativity and includes various artistic genres: paintings, graphics, drawings, sculptures, photographs, ceramics, videos, artists’ books and other contemporary media. Due to the lack of suitable spaces for permanent placement, most of the works remain stored in depots. In order for the institution to become more recognizable to the public through its valuable artistic heritage, we have decided to present this material more regularly. We recall some similar past exhibitions: Face to face, artworks of coastal artists from gallery collections and studios, 2012; Exhibition without preparations, paintings from the collection of the International Ex tempore Piran, 2017; Istria Photo International, emancipation of photography, works from the collections of the Piran Coastal Galleries, 2018; Panorama, a selection from the Piran Coastal Galleries artistic collection, 2022.

This temporary exhibition is also based on material from the collection fund, which reveals on the basis of the available museum documentation how the works of art were acquired. Just over twenty works of art, some of which have never been exhibited before, come from different collections, hence the significant title of the exhibition Miscellanea, which in Latin means mixture of heterogeneous unrelated things.

The artworks on display are accompanied by a documentary apparatus that provides information about the work of art, its author and the collection. The descriptions of the six collections – Collection of Artists from Primorska, Slovene Contemporary Art Collection after 1976, Ex tempore Piran collection, Ex Tempore Piran ceramics Collection, Photographic Collection and Medusa Collection – contain a historical framework with the fundamental idea and vision of the creation of each collection, on the basis of which works of art, as subjects with their own meaning and artistic value, became their integral part.

The rare opportunity to observe a segment of the artistic heritage preserved in the deposits and which in a certain sense reveals the character of the past collecting policy of the coastal galleries, aims to establish an active dialogue with the public and operators in the sector. Undoubtedly, it is precisely the latter that are called upon to probe even more capillaryly the happenings of contemporary artistic creativity in the border area of ​​Slovenian Istria in the future. The extended duration of the exhibition can partly compensate for the lack of a permanent location and enable the implementation of accompanying events for different target audiences.

Majda Božeglav Japelj