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Curator: Željko Mariuš

The exhibition of the painter, in and of himself, Đuro Seder (Zagreb 1927) in the Modern Gallery is imagined as the first and last complete retrospective of one of the most important Croatian painters of Modernism, Postmodernism and recent contemporary art.

A witness of Croatian art history from the 1950s onwards, he is now, in his venerable age of wisdom, still creatively active.

The exhibition has been defined in the form of the intimate confession of the artist over his work in all periods of his activity, and also a testimony of the sublimated spirit of the epoch, from a sample of more than a hundred and fifty works, oils on canvas, works on paper and prints created between 1953 and 2015.

We are talking here about works that the artist painted just after the completion of his course at the Academy of Fine Arts  in Zagreb (graduating under Antun Mezdjić, 1959, with a graduate course taught by Marino Tartaglia); then there are classic works from the time of his activity in and membership of the pre-Conceptual or underground group Gorgona (1959-1966); then from the impossibility to the possibility of the painting and the New Image (1981); works from his lesser known but very perspicuous Magrittean paintings; the seldom-seen drawings of Sederian geometry; and Seder’s personal talks with God – the relationship of the individual with something that he lives, that he creates and feels as divine – that determined the spiritual and artistic maturation of the artist; all the way down to the Sederian Expressionism broached in the 1990s, as well as the self-ironical and healthily humorous, sometimes joyous, self-portraits of the Old Wild (from 2007) and some completely new paintings.

For this occasion, works from the holdings of the Modern Gallery are joined by pieces borrowed from Seder’s studio, and from many other Croatian museums and galleries and private collections.

The innovative visual set-up of the exhibition includes projections of films about the artist. There is an additional programme with a number of museum educational events, guided tours and workshops for children and young people, and lectures about the various segments of the painter’s oeuvre by well informed guest lecturers.