The Yugoslav avant-garde
Geometric and kinetic art from a socialist state.
Myriam Thyes — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Myriam Thyes — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Myriam Thyes — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Myriam Thyes — CC BY-SA 3.0
New Zagreb is a whole district built from nothing south of the Sava from the 1950s onwards, to house hundreds of thousands in vast residential blocks in the socialist modernist manner. Its open planning and enormous masses contrast completely with the narrow streets of the old city to the north. Seeing it is useful for understanding how Yugoslavia built its cities, and the museum is the best reason to cross over.
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The Museum of Contemporary Art is the largest museum building in Croatia, opened in 2009 in Novi Zagreb — the southern bank of the Sava, an area built entirely in the Yugoslav period in a modernist architecture of large blocks. The permanent collection is strong in one field in particular: post-war Yugoslav avant-garde art. Movements such as EXAT 51 and New Tendencies emerged here and produced geometric, kinetic and experimental work in a socialist country — a period little known outside the region and important in European art history. What visitors most often remember is not a painting: a spiral slide by the artist Carsten Höller running from the upper floors to the bottom, which visitors can actually use to descend. The museum is far from the centre — about twenty minutes by tram across the river — but the building itself and its spaces justify the trip.
Geometric and kinetic art from a socialist state.
Large-block Yugoslav modernism around it.
Avenija Dubrovnik 17, 10000 Zagreb