Authors of the exhibition: Marinko Sudac, Dorotea Fotivec Očić
Curators: Štěpánka Bieleszová, Ladislav Daněk
The Bosch+Bosch Group was founded on August 27, 1969, in Subotica with Slavko Matković (Subotica, 1948 – 1994), Bálint Szombathy (Pačir, 1950) and László Szalma (Subotica, 1949 – 2005) as its founding members. The group included László Kerekeš (Stara Moravica, 1942 – Berlin, 2001) from 1971, Katalin Ladik (Novi Sad, 1942) and Attila Csernik (Bačka Topola, 1941) who joined in 1973 and Ante Vukov (Subotica, 1955 – 2012), who joined in 1975, with several short-term members (Istvan Krekovics, Edit Bacsh, Zoltan Magyar, Slobodan Tomanović). Their name came from combining the last name of the painter Hieronymous Bosch and the name of the West German technological giant Bosch – which they perceived as a signifier of the modern, technological era in which new media needed to be used to achieve one's (artistic) goals. The group was active until 1976, and the artists continued to create individually.
This multi-national group's work (with members of Hungarian, Serbian, and Croatian descent) can be interpreted in the line of New Art Practice in ex-Yugoslav art. The founding members gathered as an art section with the Youth Tribune in Subotica, but they soon left painting. The group's members came together to form a collective of like-minded peers. They were interested in new developments in art and legacies of the previous generations of Avant-garde (that of Lajos Kassák, a leading figure of Hungarian Avant-garde, or the Dadaist events held in the 1920s in Subotica).
The group's artistic work unfolded in the domain of spatial interventions, land art, Arte povera, actions and performance, conceptual art, experimental film, sound art, body art, visual semiology, new comics, and artists' books, samizdats, mail art and other. Entirely in line with the art developments in the artistic West and the latest art forms that were coming into focus, the Bosch+Bosch Group, in some way, took part in almost all phenomena present in the art scene of the time. They explored the relationship between art and the natural world, language, new media, sound, and the artist's position within it. The Bosch+Bosch Group published their samizdats Kontraktor 971 (Matković) and Wow (Matković, Szombathy).
This exhibition of works from the Marinko Sudac Collection, the most comprehensive collection of Eastern-European art (and globally connected practices) from 1909 to 1989, showcases some of the most notable and valued artworks and documentary material of the Bosch+Bosch Group, a group whose network and legacy made the peripheral city of Subotica a noteworthy landmark within the global art system. The exhibition is organised in cooperation with the Institute for the Research of the Avant-Garde, Zagreb.