The collector's strategy is directed towards systematic exploration, research, and promotion of Avant-Garde practices that have been marginalized, forbidden, and at times completely rejected, due to historical, social and political circumstances. In this respect, the Collection is, in relation to already existing European art collections, regionally cohesive, and presents an inexhaustible source for the research of Avant-Garde art and a dynamic platform for the exchange of knowledge on the phenomena of Avant-Garde.

This can be seen in numerous topical and retrospective exhibitions, and organized events, followed by connected detailed publications or studies, articles in professional journals, some published in the framework of research projects and collaborations with numerous important institutions, experts, theoreticians, art historians, and artists from the entire world.

In the last couple of years, the Hungarian public has had the chance to see the works from the Collection on exhibitions in Budapest twice – on the exhibitions Circles of Interference in the Kassák Múzeum (2012) and Transition and Transition (2014) in the Ludwig Múzeum - Museum of Contemporary art, on which they could see, among other, works of the pioneers of Hungarian historical Avant-Garde such as Farkas Molnár and Lajos Kassák.

Alongside the already mentioned Hungarian artists, the Collection includes the works of renowned representives of Neo-Avant-Garde art, such as Miklós Erdély, Tamás Szentjóby, Gábor Attalai, members of the Pécsi Műhely group and many others.

As a supporting programme of Art Market Budapest 2015, Marinko Sudac Collection will present a selection of 20 masterpieces, by 21 authors, of Yugoslav Neo-Avant-Garde and post-Avant-Garde art created from the early 1960s until the early 1980s. Emblematic works of Art informel, proto-conceptual, conceptual, and post-conceptual art, experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s, Arte Povera and ecological art, performances and urban actions, and other radical approaches created and unconventional forms of expressions in the spirit of Yugoslavian new artistic practices.

Yugoslavia (1960-1980)

Artemovsk 38, once a cargo ship, built in 1968, the turning point of European and world history of the 20th century, today it is one of the most interesting cultural centres of the Hungarian capital.

It is precisely this year, 1968, marked by global student riots, workers' strikes and direct conflicts of citizens with the forces of the reigning Communist regime on streets all across Europe, which was a reflection of countless changes in the general social, economic, and political order.

The echoes of this turmoil can be seen in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, which was at the time of the Cold War political and ideological strength comparisons of the USA and the USSR moving away from the rigid Stalinist repression, which resorted in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement and moving more towards the West.

The external political balancing of Josip Broz Tito between the Eastern and the Western block will shortly result in the creation of conditions for a unique Socialist enclave, for the modernization and the industrialisation of the country, and particular social and cultural climate, unique in context of the countries behind the Iron Curtain.

However, all the reforms that followed the 1968 riots could not secure the "Socialism with a human face", for it was impossible for it to exist in a regime which thought of every form of critique or the state apparatus an obstruction, and its critics as "enemies of the regime and the country". The resistance to political centralism and repression started in the late 1960's, and it would continue during the 1970's, and especially in the 1980's, and it will become "an increasingly influential component of political activism in Yugoslavia."

Radical Practices from the Marinko Sudac Collection

Inside the regime's ideology, and in parallel with the last bursts of "politically acceptable" modernism and leaning on its Avant-Garde predecessors, as the art historian Ješa Denegri puts it, "Other line" of art is formed, the other artistic wing of Yugoslav art, a wing of resistance, pointed against the dominant social and aesthetic norms and values. This multimedia exhibition is based on the works which testify to this exact creative activism before and after the year 1968.

The art of that period is existentialist, subversive, sometimes trying to be inconspicuous, but sometimes seen in the real space and time, and engaged and provocative. Often working as a group in a few of the then art centres - in Zagreb, Beograd, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, and Subotica, artists often produced similar art.

The critique of modernist cult of painting, the demystification of artworks, the renouncing of the aesthetic and taking on a conceptual view on the works, exploration of artistic procedures, position of the artist and art institutions, as well as art itself, as well a strong critique of the regime, are just some of the topics and preoccupations put on the artists and put to discussion.

This can be seen its experimental, often destructive character, in further decentralization of the media, and ultimately by the appearance of new artistic manners and the use of "new artistic practices", urban actions, performances, body art, anti-film, and other forms of unconventional expressions directed against the socially and ideologically acceptable art, while the galleries and the academies are replaced by alternative spaces or the street.

For more information you can download the curator's text from the following link.

Venue: A38 Ship Gallery
Address: Budapest XI., Petőfi Bridge, Buda side
Date: October 5-10, 2015
Opening hours: 10.00-18.00

Works by: Eugen Feller, Ivo Gattin // Josip Vaništa and Marijan Jevšovar from Gorgona group // Vladimir Petek // Naško Križnar, Marijan Ciglić, Tomaž Šalamun from OHO group // Slavko Matković, Bálint Szombathy from BOSCH+BOSCH group // Radomir Damnjanović Damnjan // Era Milivojević // Željko Jerman, Sven Stilinović, Boris Demur and Vlado Martek from Grupa šestorice autora [Group of Six Authors] // Tomislav Gotovac //Željko Kipke

Curator: Ivana Janković, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
Selection of works: Ivana Janković
Expert associate: Dorotea Fotivec
Volunteers: Jelena Mayer

Source: Art Market Budapest