COURAGE

connecting collections

In 1970, Tošo Dabac died and he left his studio and its entire inventory, including negatives, photographs and documents, to his nephew Petar Dabac, who was also a photographer. According to Marina Benažić, Petar Dabac took exemplary care of the materials during the thirty-four years he managed the studio, and it is to his great credit that the materials are so well-preserved. Petar Dabac had his photo gallery in the atelier (later the archives) until the beginning of Croatia’s War of Independence, and forty-seven exhibitions of renowned international and Croatian photographers and a series of workshops were held there during the 1980s.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, it was increasingly difficult to maintain the Tošo Dabac Archive, so that Petar Dabac launched negotiations with the City of Zagreb on the purchase of the collection.

In the 1970s-1980s, Marian Kropyvnytskyi had meetings with prominent Malevich experts, Dmytro Gorbachev and Oleksandr Parnis. He gave the latter a copy (one sheet) of the meeting minutes of the color section of the faculty of formal-technical disciplines. Then, Kropyvnytskyi made no mention of his private archive. It is possible that he did not know of their inclusion in his papers, or could not find the relevant documents, or forgot about them, or did not wish to talk about the collection. 

This exhibition for the first time historised, processed and took a comprehensive look at the ‘New Art Practice’, the art of the 1970s. Although the exhibition was too close in time to fully review the new art forms, it was yet another indication that the Museum of Contemporary Art was ready to present new and radical trends in art. The exhibition was intended to contribute to the better understanding of a very complex development in the art of the 1970s. The Group of Six Artists was represented at the show. Museum Curator Jadranka Vinterhalter analysed their work.

Open atelier was never repeated until 1989. Exactly 19 years after its very opening, 19 November 1989, Rudolf Sikora played an instrumental role at the establishment of the Public Against Violence movement, when he spoke at the gathering of about 500 citizens at Umelecká beseda.

The Open atelier represented the platform for an alternate way of exhibition. It endeavoured to avoid the official line of thought  both administratively and conceptually. The Open atelier has to a ajor extent outlined Sikora’s future development as well, since he could not openly exhibit and was regularly interrogated by ŠtB since then.