In the Everlasting Flux. A Selection of Modern and Contemporary Art from the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb
29 May – 29 June 2025

What do we learn about art as such once we leave the realm of representation? What meanings does abstraction bring and what does it communicate? What is the relationship between the geometric and organic principles of design and what is the place of abstraction in the context of the relationship between fine and applied arts? The celebration of the 145th anniversary of the Museum of Arts and Crafts (MUO) is a convenient moment to re-examine some fundamental questions about the nature of art, its movement, purpose, and role in the lives of individuals and communities.

Questions like these invite us to go back to the basics of thinking about images and visuality and encourage us to re-examine canonical works, to which our eyes have become so accustomed, through contemporary understandings of visual art. The works we present at the In the Everlasting Flux exhibition belong precisely to this circle – they are a selection of the best achievements of modern and contemporary art from the MUO collections, both fine and applied, which, in conjuction with the Croatian Statehood Day celebration organized by the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in Hungary, can now be viewed in HAB.

Objects gathered from the collections of painting, sculpture, graphics, recent photography, graphic design and metal as well as glass, textiles and ceramics, created from the second half of the 20th century to the first decades of the 21st century, offer one possible reading of the development of certain trends in modern and contemporary art in Croatia. What connects them is the poetics of geometric and organic abstraction, which pose the eternal and inexhaustible question about the nature of structure in a work of art. The presented works provide a cross-section of the creative poetics of predominantly Croatian artists and designers such as Ivan Picelj, Aleksandar Srnec, Juraj Dobrović, Miroslav Šutej and Milan Vulpe, while deviations from the national key selection vividly testify to the rich cultural connections and exchanges with other artistic centers within the European and global context. Reflecting the aesthetic changes of its time and the cyclical changes of the thought and sensory principle, In the Everlasting Flux confronts us with the only consistency – that of eternal flow and constant change.

Curator: Petra Galović
On view: 29 May – 29 June 2025
Free entry!

Juraj Dobrović: Spatial Construction (1964)
Aleksandar Srnec: Untitled (1957)
Miroslav Šutej: Patchwork Print (1975)
Nadica Eichhorn: Fruits of the Field (2009)
Mladen Grčević: Luminokinetics I (1953)

Previous exhibitions

In the Everlasting Flux. A Selection of Modern and Contemporary Art from the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb

29 May – 29 June 2025

Read more →
Invisible to the Naked Eye

April 8 to May 18, 2025

Read more →
Bardo – Derkó – Exhibition of the 2024 Derkovits Gyula Fine Arts Scholarship holders

2025.02.26. – 2025.03.30.

Read more →
Garden. The Possibility of Life

Read more →
Inebriation in Art

2024.09.27. – 2024.11.24.

Read more →
Vasarely x Fajó – Conquering the Planet

2024.05.09. - 2024.09.18.

Read more →
New Start. Masterpieces by twenty-five pioneering artists

23 January 2024 - 07 April 2024

Read more →
Becoming. The force of existence

6 October 2023 - 14 January 2024

Read more →
Across the ages. A selection from the MBH Bank Collection and works by contemporary artists

8 June – 24 September 2023

Read more →