31 May 2025 – Celebration of Zagreb City Day – FREE ENTRY TO OUR EXHIBITIONS AND SPECIAL FREE CURATORIAL AND AUTHORIAL TOURS

Dear Visitors,

On Saturday, 31 May 2025, to mark the celebration of Zagreb City Day, we are pleased to offer free entry to our exhibitions, along with special free authorial and curatorial guided tours:

KVIZ COLLECTION – Little Treasury of Croatian Painting

The Dr Boris and Jelva Kviz Collection is one of the most respected yet publicly unknown collections of modern Croatian painting. It comprises 68 works, mostly masterpieces from the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century. Notable among them are “Self-Portrait” by Josip Račić from 1906/7 – individually protected as a cultural asset – and “Five Senses” by Vlaho Bukovac from 1898, also under the protection of the Republic of Croatia. The collection includes multiple works by artists of the Croatian modern period, ranging from Vlaho Bukovac, Bela Csikos Sesia, Ferdo Kovačević, Menci Clement Crnčić, Emanuel Vidović, and Miroslav Kraljević and the Munich Four, to Milivoj Uzelac and the Prague Four, as well as Ljubo Babić, Jerolim Miše, Miljenko Stančić, and others.

Paintings from the Kviz Collection are regularly loaned for retrospective and other exhibitions. The collection was begun in the early 1970s by Professor Boris Kviz, a distinguished professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb, and his wife Jelva. All works and their provenance have been meticulously documented and catalogued. The entire collection has been donated to the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery, and Zagreb City Day is a wonderful opportunity to discover this valuable new donation.

VUCO: State of Things, monographic exhibition

The early career of Miro Vuco was marked by his involvement with the Biafra group, active from 1970 to 1978. This period defined his artistic thinking and commitment to activism and socially engaged art. His opposition to social indifference was expressed visually through his resistance to local abstraction, particularly self-referential conceptual art. Critics have described his sculptures from this period as a form of “radical realism” with an existential tone. Instead of using traditional materials such as bronze, Vuco preferred non-standard, often ephemeral materials like polyester – crucial to understanding the nature of this exhibition. Besides sculpture, Vuco is also engaged in painting, which will be presented to the Croatian public for the first time in this exhibition. His art is marked by diversity and playfulness: morphological and thematic curiosity, as well as an interest in experimental solutions. This exhibition represents a culmination of Miro Vuco’s decades-long artistic practice, which began during the uncertain social climate of the 1970s and continues to this day, shaped by new but equally challenging circumstances.

Additionally, we have organised special free authorial and curatorial guided tours of the exhibitions (in Croatian):

• 12:00 – Authorial tour: Petra Vugrinec, PhD – KVIZ COLLECTION – Little Treasury of Croatian Painting
• 17:00 – Curatorial tour: Anamarija Komesarović – VUCO: State of Things, monographic exhibition