Heroes we Love

socialist realism revised

case study: ex-Yugoslavia

artists: APT artist Jasmina Cibic (SLO) Antun Augustinčić (CRO), Vojin Bakić (CRO), , Lojze Dolinar (SLO), Igor Grubić (CRO), Boža Ilić (SRB), Sanja Iveković (CRO), Boris Kalin (SLO), Zdenko Kalin (SLO), Nikola Kečanin (CRO), Anton Gojmir Kos (SLO), Tone Kralj (SLO),  Frano Kršinić (CRO), Siniša Labrović (CRO), Luiza Margan (CRO), Dalibor Martinis (CRO), Vinko Matković (CRO), Ivan Mirković (CRO), Slavko Pengov (SLO), Tadej Pogačar (SLO), Arjan Pregl (SLO), Karel Putrih (SLO), Vanja Radauš (CRO), Radeta Stanković (SRB), Sreten Stojanović (SRB).

curators: Simona Vidmar & Miško Šuvaković

Maribor Art Gallery is proud to announce that the coming exhibition is part of the larger international project “Heroes We Love. Ideology, Identity and Socialist Art in New Europe”, supported by the European program Creative Europe 2014−2020. In the period 2015−2017, the project will deal with the legacy of socialist art in New Europe and focus on the most important art-related issues, problems and opportunities of the period as well as produce a series of exhibitions, public art interventions, and international conferences and workshops.

The relatively unknown period of socialist realism in Slovenia and in the broader region of the former Yugoslavia was a time of generous commissions and unrestrained socialist iconography, a time of heroic enthusiasm and monumental propaganda. It was the last artistic period of uncensored manifest power, when the state was its sole consumer and commissioner. Socialist realism was marked as doctrinal art in the service of the party, an eclectic and academic artistic configuration, a conservative, anti-avant-garde stream, and an art of empty visualization and false sentiments. Majestic monuments and monumental sculptures, heroic murals and enormous canvases of socialist realism ended, as is characteristic for political transitions and running largely parallel with their initiation, in the dustbin of history. Ridiculed, hidden or forgotten they reside anonymously, in silent conformity with the largely unquestioned canon of the history of art.

Heroes We Love enters a controversial field of socialist heroic art in order to identify and acknowledge those protagonists who brought the monumental art of the preset political landscape to its peak. We are interested in the iconography of socialist realism in all its mighty, generous, heroic realizations; in its sentiments, repartee, and feeling of drama, its large-scale commissions and more. We wish to understand how far revolutionary romanticism went, from what and where it drew, and how it imploded into itself. Monuments as constructions of time and space simplify and fabricate a particular history. The question here is, whether this monumental socialist art is also capable of creating history − a history of art. Walter Benjamin wrote that "there has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism" that needs to be understood as "a tool of the ruling classes." Similarly, the monuments of socialist realism too bear witness to recent culture – and barbarism. It is time to recognize them!