The Gallery of Fine Arts Slovenj Gradec was founded in 1957 as a central regional gallery institution. It is focused on contemporary art, which does not exclude other periods in history. Special attention at home and abroad was drawn by international fine art exhibitions under the sponsorship of the United Nations in 1966, 1975, 1979, 1985 and 1991. There was an important exhibition The Artist and Urban Environment, which displayed art activity in Peace Messenger Cities. In 1997 A number of famous artists took part in the exhibitions, including Henry Moore and Ossip Zadkine, the latter with a large review exhibition in 1991. The Gallery of Fine Arts, Slovenj Gradec, is housed on the first floor of the old town hall in the centre of the historic town core. A modern exhibition gallery was added to the existing building in 1976.

Peace, Humanity, and Friendship between Nations, and therefore artists from as many countries as possible were invited. The selectors were fortunate, since many of the young artists invited have since become prominent in the domestic and international fine art scenes . But several famous stars of fifties and sixties art also exhibited, including Henry Moore, Ossip Zadkine, Victor Vassarely, Johny Friedlaender, and others, which in the given social conditions of the existing state meant freshness and the will to supplant the provinciality of the surroundings with lively international artistic activity. For over a decade and half the Academy of Fine Arts had been operational in Ljubljana, and it was its professors, students, and graduates who - beside the central Slovene contemporary art institution, the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana - explored ways to assert themselves also beyond the domestic cultural arena. Others had followed these endeavours, and Slovenj Gradec was one of them. The incentive behind fine art exhibitions in Slovenj Gradec came from the local academic circle with Karel Pečko, a graduate from the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, on its forefront. He conceived an ambitious exhibition programme, and invited fine art critics to co-operate as selectors, which in the sixties was by no means established practice in Slovene galleries. The first Documenta in Kassel was launched by Arnold Bode in 1955, while somewhere in the province, on the fringe of Europe, the painter and pedagogue Karel Pečko had a similar dream: to animate this sleepy town and give it a cosmopolitan character with the help of the fine arts. Perhaps the comparison is too ambitious, but the endeavour to create a fine arts centre out of a rural town like Slovenj Gradec, certainly merits it. Slovenia was part of the then Socialist Yugoslavia, and only a skillful organiser could successfully have convinced the ruling elite in the town that the fine arts were precisely what was needed to elevate the town's reputation. The decision to invite the United Nations to take honorary patronage over the exhibitions proved to be appropriate, and it guaranteed the participation of renowned artists. Last but not least, participation in exhibitions in a socialist country represented a kind of challenge to some artists. One way or another, the exhibitions have opened Slovenj Gradec up to the world, and domestic fine art production has taken its place side by side with that from abroad. In these pioneering times for contemporary fine art in Slovenia regarding international fine art activity, an important role was performed by the approved International Fine Art Biennial in Ljubljana, which still proves to be fluent, while Slovenj Gradec has also been turning its attention to the lively fine art scene in the nearby cities of Graz and Zagreb, which were as accessible as the Slovene capital.
When in 1975 the French artist Daniel Buren was invited to Slovenj Gradec to participate at the international fine art exhibition - the outlined theme was Engaged Figuration - he chose a conceptual artistic engagement, as he placed his blue-white flag among other flags hanging in front of the gallery and announcing the participation of artists from different countries. It was over a decade ago when the idea developed in the world that it is not only the physical existence of a work of art, or its material form, that is important, but primarily its concept and message and pure philosophical reflection, which partly materialises itself in the installation. Slovenia still lived in the spirit of the more or less uncomprehended conceptual activity of the OHO group in the seventies (the manifesto of conceptual art, entitled One and Three Chairs, was produced by Joseph Kosuth in 1965 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Although one could no longer speak of the pioneering days of Slovene contemporary art, Slovene fine art criticism of the day did not take much interest in the work of the currently very famous French artist who created his installation in front of the Slovenj Gradec gallery. And beside numerous artists who exhibited more "classical" works in the gallery, there were still other conceptualists. One of them was Pino Poggi with his AU Arte Utile Manifesto, which the artist claimed to be a graphic work with the functions of film and newspaper, and which entices the viewer to engage in constructive thinking. Braco Dimitrijević, an artist born in Sarajevo who only later acquired international acclaim, also participated at the exhibition with two documentary photographs; under the portrait bust of Albert Vieri, made by an unknown artist, he wrote: "Alberto Vieri, a passer-by whom I met by chance at 4.15 PM, in 1973 in Turin." And under the other portrait he wrote: "This could be a work by Braco Dimitrijevi}."
Four years later, the Slovenj Gradec international fine art exhibition opened some of the most topical issues of contemporary fine art again, and this time it was with the self-confident appearance of domestic selectors and their colleagues from abroad , as the contacts with the AICA international association and several foreign institutions were continually growing stronger. The exhibition exposed the problems of the socialisation of art and psycho-formation, it dealt with the peripheral areas of fine art, and touched upon the alternatives in contemporary architecture in the seventies - all this subjects were intended to stimulate a critical reflection in the context of fine art. Among the exhibitors was the Italian artist Ico Parisi who constructed the Wall of Apocalypse in the hall of the Gallery; today this act is seen as a truly prophetic warning on modern communication and the addiction to electronic media. The installation made up part of a series of his "therapeutic" actions, and with one of them - the so-called Operation Arcevia - he also participated at the 1976 Venice Biennial. The metaphorical and allegorical messages were also expressed in the works of his compatriot Fabio de Sanctis, also presented at the exhibition. His works - Tables with a Disturbed Functioning, The Great Travel of a Euro-Fetishist, The Olive Wood Divan, and others - were filled with cynical irony and paraphrases. Unusual furniture pieces by the Englishman, John Makepeace, also paraphrased the post-modern era. Of course, most of the artists expressed themselves through traditional fine art vocabulary (the Narrative Painting section), with a palette of personal poetics which also took account - to a greater or lesser extent - of the principles of aesthetic approaches with a critical consideration of the continuity of artistic practice.
This continuity was certainly also featured in the 1985 exhibition, when the subject of the exhibition was not defined, while the concept was only bound to the technique of woodcut and small sculpture in wood. The choice of traditional fine art materials also meant a return to the appreciation of the traditional aesthetic of fine art works, while the simultaneous international architectural invitation for a wooden family house, and the exhibition of the submitted projects, only confirmed this orientation. The author of the exhibition, art historian Stane Bernik, had already presented the same problems of residential architecture, with a particular emphasis on alternatives in modern architecture, at the 1979 exhibition. Therefore it came as a logical decision that the 1985 exhibition concept was followed by the exhibition of works by Ossip Zadkine from the artist's collection in Paris. The exhibition took place in 1991. The sculpture Memorial to the Apologist of Cubism - the Poet Guillame Apollinaire (1937, bronze), which Zadkine presented as a gift to Slovenj Gradec at the first international fine art exhibition in 1966, was transferred from Paris - with the permission of the foundation - as late as 1990, and in the same year it took its place in the atrium of the gallery. But this was not the sole reason for the exhibition; Zadkine's exhibition meant a logical continuation of the exhibitions which emphasised traditional fine art practice, and one of the most important among them was certainly the exhibition of sculptures and graphic works by Henry Moore in 1979.
Towards the end of the nineties, before the preparations for the international fine art exhibition which this time was particularly animated by the active contribution of Slovenj Gradec in the non-governmental organisation of Cities - Messengers of Peace, the fact became prominent that the issue of the influence of urban surroundings on artists and their works needed to be reassessed. We did not primarily have in mind manifestations in specific urban space, known as open-air projects (although these are also included), but rather the incorporation of artists into living surroundings, their reactions here and now, conscious or unconscious. Artistic engagement lies precisely in the sublimation of the actual through various means: namely, a materialised fine art concept, or even its fiction (new media), reflect much more reality than an eloquent inscription in the manner of a figurative depiction. All the contrasts of contemporary society, the problems of migrations, and the ethical and cultural individuality of peoples, which contribute to the creation of an artist's individual attitude, are much more strongly expressed in urban, over-populated surroundings. Such a perception leads to a subjective creative act, although the artist is not always aware of it and he/she seemingly engages quite different kinds of problems. But just as it is not possible to eliminate the knowledge of history, although we do not study it specifically, the cultural reality is in a certain way binding, regardless of how introverted a person might be. Thus the urban surrounding is not only a set of human actions and material culture: the social space as a whole is manifested precisely in the work of artists, not only in their concrete interventions in space, but also in their most intimate personal poetry.
The theme of The Artist and an Urban Environment exhibition, therefore, seems to be broad enough to allow for the incorporation of quality fine art works, including those whose creators did not reflect very profoundly or concretely on the issues of the contemporary urban world, but had allowed themselves to be driven by their own creative potential and the universal nature of fine art expression; our task remains, however, that even in such works we look for answers to such questions as: "What is the role of artists in the urban environment, and how do artists respond to it? How much are they influenced by the specificity of a surrounding, or the cultural space, and what can they themselves give to it?"
The exhibition provided answers to at least some of the questions. The ever topical theme indicated the problems of contemporary society, most eloquently with the expressive potential of photography and video, very concretely also with the written reflections and installations, and sufficiently sensitively and sometimes even exotically with several "classical" fine art works. But regardless of the variations of discourses of the represented works the exhibition proves to be very complex, and it offers an interesting confrontation of individual exhibits, while also revealing the sociological aspect of the exhibition, which is topical and ever more necessary.

Milena Zlatar, director

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