The Museum for Arts and Crafts is staging “Dairies of Dream Visions,” an exhibition in memory of Virgilije Nevjestić, who passed away in 2009, featuring some three hundred of his graphic art works, drawings, oils on canvas, pastels, aquarelles and works in ceramic.
The Museum for Arts and Crafts (MUO) is staging “Dairies of Dream Visions,” an exhibition in memory of Virgilije Nevjestić, who passed away in 2009, featuring some three hundred of his graphic art works, drawings, oils on canvas, pastels, aquarelles and works in ceramic.
The exhibition opened March 27th and is centred on Nevjestić’s graphic art. MUO director, and the author of this exhibition, Miroslav Gašparović considers Nevjestić’s work to be among the very best in the world and significantly underrated.
“Virgilije Nevjestić’s atelier at No 28 on the Boulevard Saint Jacques, across the way from Paris’ prison, was a wondrous venue for the creation of art,” says Gašparović in his foreword, noting that its essence was preserved by the artist’s family.
Like many others from his part of the country, Nevjestić was forced to migrate by poverty and never returned. In spite of his humble beginnings (he was born as the eighth child to a poor family in the Herzegovinian village of Kolo), Nevjestić’s desire to leave was not motivated only by existential considerations. This is corroborated by his diary, in which he recorded his need to remove himself from the environment, for solitude and his wanderlust.
“Even in his earliest works, created during the days of his studies in Zagreb in the early 1960s, Nevjestić developed a very specific iconography of a phantasmagorical world, not by chance compared by critics with the universe of H. Bosch – a vision he remained largely faithful to to the end of his life. His graphic art is strange and unsettled, at times of imbalanced composition, boiling over in a congestion of life that the author symbolically and factually regards from the side-lines – from the margins of the painting, thereby defining early on his core artistic credo of an active observer,” notes Miroslav Gašparović in his foreword to the exhibition.
Gašparović says that the exhibition at the Museum for Arts and Crafts is only the first such presentation of Nevjestić’s legacy and an encouragement for future study of the oeuvre of this major artist. (tportal.hr)
Croatian graphic artist, painter and poet Virgilije Nevjestić passed away in Paris in 2009 at the age of 73. He was born in the village of Kolo near Tomislavgrad in 1935. Nevjestić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1963 and completed his specialisation three years later at the department of graphic art. He moved to Paris in 1968. In 1987 he founded the Académie Virgile in Paris where he taught graphic art. He also lectured at the French institute for restoration of art. He has produced portfolios of graphic art and bibliophile editions of the poems of A. B. Šimić, D. Tadijanović, S. Čuić and C. Baudelaire. He staged solo exhibitions in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Milan, Paris, Boston, Tokyo, Florence, London, Rome, Den Haag, Brussels, Vancouver and New York. (Hina)