Maribor Impressions
Maribor Impressions. From graphic maps of Maribor Art Gallery and Maribor Regional Museum.
UGM Kabinet, Strossmayer street 6
9 November 2023—5 January 2024
opening: Thursday, 9 November 2023, 18:00
artists: Viktor Cotič, Josip Pipo Peteln, Oton Polak, Fran Stiplovšek
curator: Simona Vidmar
We present almost forgotten graphic cycles of Maribor’s vedutas from the first half of the 20th century. Three painters and graphic artists - Viktor Cotič, Josip Pipo Peteln, Fran Stiplovšek - are deserved for the fact that today the Maribor Art Gallery and the Maribor Regional Museum preserve several stylistically diverse and rich in motifs views of the old city center - from the inside and outside the city walls. The graphic maps of Old Maribor were mostly created in the 1920s and 1930s. The first of those was a series of woodcuts by Viktor Cotič. The period lasted till the early 1950s, when the last such graphic series were created by the painter Oton Polak, rounding off a period with views of medieval Maribor and its suburbs as a constant feature of artistic creation. The realistic lithographs of Josip Pip Peteln, the schematic woodcuts of Viktor Cotič, the darker prints in the spirit of Fran Stiplovšek's expressionism and the highly detailed, timeless etchings of Oton Polak reveal familiar as well as less familiar views of the city, stringing a series of images that are now recognizable city’s vedutas.
With the exhibition we are joining the celebration of the 120th anniversary of the Maribor Regional Museum, the parent institution from which the Maribor Art Gallery emerged in 1954. To commemorate the connection between the two museums, the exhibition presents the story of the symbolic beginning of the Maribor Art Gallery’s Collection - the painting by the impressionist Ivan Grohar, The Chapel in Crngrob (1907), which was purchased by the Grohar Art Club in 1922 with the intention of establishing a city gallery. The painting was passed 30 years later from the Maribor Regional Museum to the collection of the newly founded Maribor Art Gallery.
