Art Gallery ''Nadežda Petrović'' Čačak

The cultural monument was erected on the initiative of the Women's Branch Čačak (a branch of the Women's Association Belgrade) for the needs of the Women's Workers' School, founded in 1890. This ground floor building, with a rectangular base, was built in 1911 in the inner city. After the Second World War, the women's craft school continued to operate until its abolition in 1948. Since 1965, the building houses the Art Gallery "Nadežda Petrović".

Art Gallery organizes the biennial manifestation of fine / visual art Nadežda Petrović Memorial, which is actually the main program basis of the institution's activities. In addition to the Memorial, regular exhibitions Young, Awarded at the Memorials, Graphics, Recognition, Sonja's September, ChanceArt are organized in three exhibition spaces and permanent exhibitions in the Nadežda Petrović Memorial Room, the Risim Gallery and the Sonja Savić Memorial Room.    

The painting belongs to the Munich period of Nadežda's painting and is considered to be a painting by which Serbian painting definitely went beyond the academic framework. This unusual coloristic portrait, of exceptional expressive power, shows a different path in relation to the then ruling academic-realistic attitudes in Serbian painting.

A painting depicting a powerful turbulent wave hitting the coast with all its force was created during Nadežda's study stay in France. After Paris, Nadežda travels around Brittany and Normandy when some of the anthological paintings of the "Paris period" are created, such as the painting of the Sea. Nadežda Petrović managed to emphasize her own artistic energy in this painting and, with a scarce palette, evokes all the power of nature, transferring to the painting canvas the  scene of the power of a natural force embodied in a single wave.

The painting belongs to the War Period of Nadežda's painting, and the warmth of colors, pastoral layers of color and expression of the scene of the old urban whole of the city of Prizren definitely confirm the dominance of expressionism in her painting. The picture shows the center of the old town of Prizren with an oriental fountain (fountain) and the domes of the churches of St. Nicholas and St. George in the background.

The painting belongs to the War period of Nadežda's work, when in the background of cruel war events, paintings of indescribable beauty and high artistic value are created. The motifs of the paintings of the war period do not directly touch on the events of the war, but, suppressing the scenes of war horrors, the paintings depict the beauty of Serbian landscapes and the architectural sublimity of medieval monasteries.

The picture shows the way in which Beta Vukanović easily solved atmospheric plain-air and light and shadow problems, and is considered one of the most beautiful pictures of the Serbian plаin air, which confirms the reason why Beta is the most typical representative of this style in Serbia. She expertly transferred to the canvas all the splendor of sunlight, bright and shaded parts, evoking the flickers of light, the beauty of nature and the pleasantness of the day.

One of the most important paintings of Serbian art between the two world wars expressively and easily evokes the flicker of light and the transparency of the shadows characteristic of French Impressionism. It was created during one of the stays in the Estonian capital Tallinn, where the family of the artist's wife lived. Through the tall canopies, you can see the summer house of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great in the complex of the imperial residence in the old part of the capital of Estonia, the picturesque Baltic port of Tallinn. 

Inspired by social, impressionistic and intimate motifs, Tabaković painted in the spirit of refined coloristic artistry. The picture is created in a later period, but still in social themes. In perfect compositional harmony, the picture is dominated by two balls, one of which is the sun, and three hands in motion - as a cut-off moment of time, a moment in the game whose continuation can be sensed. Favorite games of that time represent a refined ambience.

Stojan Ćelić belongs to the circle that in the second half of the twentieth century introduced Yugoslav and Serbian art into the artistic context of world creativity. In the early phase, he turned to new abstract expressions, reducing the plasticity of images to line, surface and color as the dominant, in order to gradually reduce the realism of form to the basic elements. He explores the elements of the landscape, translating it into rough masses and then into very precisely placed coloristic surfaces.

In the style of poetic realism, Marko Čelebonović painted a series of still lifes on which, through selected objects placed on the surface, without pronounced depth and arranged according to artistic feeling, he corresponds with the observer, providing him with a special lyrical atmosphere. The whiteness of three objects in this still life, with a slender little white heron and a plaster bust of a boy in the foreground, puts them on the border with vision, and the background, painted with a monochrome palette in cool green shades, brings the atmosphere of serenity closer to melancholy. 

In all of Stančić's paintings, there is a metamorphosis and a tendency to bring a sad, often tragic note to the depiction of childhood with something disturbing, at first glance invisible. This painting is mainly a materialization of melancholy and sleep, which is characterized by purity of expression, poetics and refined sensitivity. The themes of the paintings are the experience of childhood and early youth, and the world he depicts is always hides the other one.

The currents of life, the stone, the sea and the feeling of the warmth of the sun formed the artistic attitude of Petar Lubarda, to summarize his understanding of the universe in a dramatic charge. In the search and research of materials, he was among the first to introduce enamel paint, not for technological change but to emphasize the structure of the composition and to draw the impulsive glow of the main figure on the surface of the painting - in this case the bull, mythical, symbolically, the strongest  animal of our region.

At the beginning of the sixties of the last century, mature, defined works by Pedja Milosavljević were created - enigmatic large formats of mild color and feelings of anxiety in movement, applying color and achieving the desired lyrical effects. Perpetuum immobile would, in loose translation, mean eternal immobility. The composition full of symbols, entangled in the context of history, floats on the surface of the blue sea.

Milovan Vidak is a painter who aspired to paint an absolute painting, painting above all paintings. He painted and looked for the center, the center that sums up all the energy, not neglecting the colors or the play of light, which often fascinated the observer. He strived for perfection and with his thoughts and painting philosophy he was unique in the history of our painting.

Man-figure is the name of a series of paintings from the theme "Picture of Execution" created in the late seventies of the last century, when Velicković puts in the foreground a man tortured and persecuted as the beast, emphasizing the universal tragedy of human existence. The emotion of the scene itself is evoked by the masterful visualization of the image / drawing of the decapitated male nude, the expressive emphasis on the plasticity of the muscle mass and tendons.

The painting is characteristic of Murtić's painting, which is created spontaneously, without restraint, strongly and thoughtfully. With a wide swing from the center, the parts scatter all over the canvas and return to the starting point, carried by a storm of energetic strokes, of a clear raw color. Dominated by black and white, yellow and red emerge from the background, creating an additional structural explosion in the image.

The painting Quadro (Italian for painting), is one of the best examples to which the artist can reach the limit with his imagination - the painting of purified pointillism is dominated by lonely dots of rich color. The hypnotic appeal of the image of such freedom of expression is fascinating. The artist himself says that it is acting, it  is the very act of performing a work of art that is enjoyed by those present as much as the author himself.

An impressive painting with an interesting name "To see Naples and die!" Belongs to the expressionist style that he nurtured in the 1980s. taken from Goethe's quotation, to this day unexplained. Did Goethe, and thus Kulmer, think of Naples looking at history full of destruction, conquest and bloody conflicts, or a city that must be seen because of the miraculous overlap of cultural movements, gastronomy and interesting nature with Mount Vesuvius, which constantly dominates the whole area with constants activity?

Otasević, through his long opus, develops a pop-artistic view of the world. He takes consumer culture and everyday life as a topic, and consciously flirts with kitsch and introduces humor and wit. Behind the casualness and wit of his works stands the lucidity and serious critical analysis of society. The work With golden cutlery belongs to paintings-objects. The artist processes the three-dimensional scene of the table with the set culinary specialty and the appropriate cutlery as a two-dimensional scene.

The characteristic of Zvonimir Santrač's art work so far are based on evident conceptual reasons and concrete reasons. Santrac's "artistic gene" reacts in an engaged way to current events in the social environment and concretizes them through artistic practice, which has as its end result an object / action / redemption object / installation. Santrac created a ready-made item using alternative materials (veneer) and fitting them into the historical concept (Biedermeier closet).

The name corset comes from the old French word cors, which is a diminutive of the Latin word corpus, body. The most common and well-known use of corsets, is to make the torso slimmer. The golden age of the corset began in the time of Queen Victoria, when the smaller body circumference between the chest and the pelvic girdle meant a higher social status. In the work of Selma Đulizarević, the corset is a symbol of restraint due to a higher imperative, attractive appearance and preferably shaped torso.

The paintings under the common name "Barcoded Paintings" are a logical continuation of Marković's rather expanded vision from previous narratives. Miraculously seductive images would be even decorative, if strong dominant smears of graffiti from the depth were not added to the technically clear and precise, breaking the smooth surface of the image so that the form and cynicism in the content of "Barcoded Paintings" can be read as a critical view of the peaks of  neoliberal capitalism system.

The artist dedicates her work to everyday scenes, small pleasures, memories and objects (mirrors, jewelry boxes, perfume bottles, porcelain figurines, photographs), viewing them as an introduction to the metaphysical world in which feeling is important, not time and transience. When she focuses on everyday objects, she chooses those intended for women, emphasizing their multi-layered nature - the fact that they carry aesthetics, nostalgia, but also emancipation, self-awareness and enjoyment.

The work of M-II belongs to the cycle of paintings and photographs included in the title "EXPHASIS". Exphrasis, from the Greek word εκφραζειν meaning "to explain completely" is a rhetorical figure that describes a work of art, real or imaginary. One of the oldest examples of exphrasis in literature comes from the Iliad (Book 18), which describes in detail the Achilles' shield and the way Hephaestus made it.

The institution is the winner of various professional and social awards for its work on improving the presentation of fine / visual arts, artistic production and museological activities. According to the strategy of the city of Čačak and its own plans and programs, the goal has been achieved to position itself as a leading institution of this type in central Serbia and among several leaders in the country.