Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin

CONTEMPORARY GALLERY ZRENJANIN

Savremena galerija Zrenjanin

In 1956, the town of Zrenjanin founded an art colony in Ečka, a village near Zrenjanin. Art Colony Ečka began at a time when art colonies in Vojvodina (Senta, Bačka Topola, Bečej, Kikinda, Ruma, Novi Kneževac) had already gained some experience in organizing temporary residences of interested artists which became gathering places of new artistic ideas. In 1958 Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin was founded as an institution with the task to look after the works of art, created mostly in Art Colony Ečka, as well as to continue organizing gatherings of artists in Ečka. Since its foundation in 1956, Art Colony Ečka gathered artists engaged in different traditional artistic disciplines (painting, sculpture, graphics, drawings) and eventually only two gatherings remained – the one of artists engaged in classical painting and the other of artists doing watercolour paintings. In 2006 for the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the colony there was a change in the concept of traditional gatherings of painters when in accordance with the already present pluralism and interdisciplinarity in contemporary art, artists in Ečka were no longer restricted, in terms of the media, to traditionally divided artistic disciplines, and were now able to realise their ideas in various forms of modern artistic expression.

Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin collects, preserves, systematically explores and exhibits artworks of Yugoslav and Serbian postwar art, created mostly in Art Colony Ečka. The policy of collecting and creating the collection that contains more than two thousand and seven hundred master pieces from ex-Yugoslavia and abroad, enabled not only a follow up of the work of the Colony in Ečka, but an overview of the contemporary art of Yugoslavia (but also Serbia) since 1946 until present. Until the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade 1965, Colony in Ečka was the only place in Serbia where representational production of Yugoslav art could be seen in one place. Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin has a collection of paintings and watercolours, collection of sculptures, objects and installations, graphic art collection (graphics and drawings), collection of new media art (photographs, video art, etc.) and a collection of foreign art (works created in various techniques in various media by foreign artists who worked in Art Colony Ečka). Importance of the Contemporary Gallery’s fund requires serious scientific and historical exploration, museological elaboration, digitalization and presentation through thematic exhibitions and permanent presentation. Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin performs through various contents: organization of the workshops for domestic and foreign artists in Art Colony Ečka, organizing exhibitions of domestic and foreign contemporary art, organizing international manifestation Biennale of the Watercolor. All exhibitions in the Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin are followed by professional publications such as catalogues. Exhibitions are followed by other activities: workshops for children, concerts, promotions of the professional literature and professional lectures. Basic fields of activities of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin are giving emphasis to thematic and research exhibitions that communicate the essence of the collection of Contemporary Gallery Zrenjanin, drawing attention to scientific activities and transferring knowledge through didactical exhibitions, expansion of exhibitions related to current tendencies in contemporary art, as well as exploring new working methods in the field of visual culture, history and art theory and museological and curatorial practice.