An exhibition dedicated to sculptor Vanja Radauš has opened at the renovated Slavko Kopač Gallery of Fine Arts in Vinkovci, featuring 25 works from various cycles, ranging from early pieces from the 1930s to later creations. Among the exhibited works, three by Radauš are being presented to the public for the first time; these are pieces held in private collections.
The exhibition was realised in cooperation with the Vinkovci City Museum, the HAZU (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts) Glyptotheca and the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, and includes works from the Croatian Historical Museum as well as private collections. The display can be viewed until 10 January.
Hrvoje Vulić, director of the Vinkovci City Museum, emphasised that the aim of the exhibition is to draw renewed attention to an artist who left a significant mark on Croatian art but has gradually been neglected at the national level. He expressed hope that the exhibition will rekindle interest in Radauš’s creative output. The City Museum otherwise holds around 1,300 of Radauš’s drawings, sketches and graphics.
Branko Franceschi, director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, spoke about the diversity of Radauš’s creative work. Exhibition curator and gallery head Zoran Šimunović explained that the organisation required cooperation with numerous institutions and private collectors.
The author of the extensive study on Radauš in the foreword to the Vinkovci exhibition catalogue is Davorin Vujičić, head of the Antun Augustinčić Gallery in Klanjec. He highlights that Radauš’s sculptural oeuvre belongs to the very top of Croatian art and that Radauš’s work deserves more attention than the controversies that often accompanied his private life. Vujičić notes that Radauš was one of the few sculptors after the Second World War who critically related to the reality in which he lived, and particularly singles out the cycle Panopticum Croaticum, with which the artist questioned the social and cultural values of his time. In the text, he also wrote that no sculptor in 20th-century Croatian art had a spirit as restless as Vanja Radauš. Radauš’s sculptural oeuvre is described as diverse, vast, restless, still incompletely catalogued and processed, and scattered across museum and private collections in Croatia and abroad.
The Vinkovci City Museum is organising the exhibition to mark the 120th anniversary of Vanja Radauš’s birth and the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Vinkovci City Museum. Vanja Radauš was born in Vinkovci on 29 April 1906, and died in Zagreb on 24 April 1975. The opening ceremony was enhanced by Dora Vrselja, a student at the Josip Runjanin Music School, who performed Vanja Radauš’s song "Prosula se sunčina".
