Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 focuses on the parallels and connections among an international scene of artists working in—and in reference to—Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. The radical experimentation, expansion, and dissemination of ideas that marked the cultural production of these decades (which flanked the widespread student protests of 1968) challenge established art-historical narratives in the West. Artists from Prague to Mexico City developed alternative and ever-expanding networks of distribution and organization, via Paris, Vienna, and Venice, to circumvent the borders established after World War II, local forms of state and military repression, and Western accounts of artistic mastery and individualism. One major transformation across Latin American and Eastern European art scenes was the embrace of institutional critique and an emphasis on the creation of art outside a market context.
This exhibition connects the works of fifteen artists and one group; it presents a brief personal history of the radical tendencies of modern and contemporary art in Croatia.
On the occasion of the anniversary of the nineties and the tenth anniversary of the death of Julije Knifer (Osijek, 1924 - Paris, 2004). Museum of Modern Art will hold a retrospective of one of the greatest Croatian painters of the 20th century, which will cover more than half a century of his artistic activity.
The exhibited works are on loan from the collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, which will exhibit a large retrospective of Julije Knifer's work in the Fall of works from the 70s up until the last century. These works are presented along side a selection of documents, which are kept in the Archive of Visual Arts Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. Izložba was established by the Ministry of Culture and the city of Osijek, which provided the Museum of Slavonia with the funds to purchase one of Knifer drawings, which is also featured in the exhibition.