Gallery RIMA

The oldest of nine children, Nadežda Petrović (born on 11 October 1873) was already the rst in its environment.1 Owing to the love and understanding of her parents, her middle-class upbringing and her progressive education, as well as the support o ered by her family and devoted friends, Nadežda grew into a unique personality with her self-con dence and stubbornness, persistence and commitment – a personality who was able to realise, thanks to her ardent spiritual and intellectual force and optimism, a number of new tasks exceptionally important to the Serbian society, culture and art in the beginning of the twentieth century.

The foremost of her realisations was certainly her opulent painterly opus as the prime outcome of her artistic creation to which she had devoted her entire life. Despite the limited reaches of social surroundings and the cultural-artistic development in Serbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the originator of the modernist style and personality at the bow of Serbian modern painting, Nadežda was able to produce works that marked the Serbian art history with capital letters. She was ahead of others in di erent phases of her professional development, driven by unruly nature, liberal spirit and her human need to create; she was the rst student in the female department of Kutlik’s school of painting and drawing; in the rst decade of the twentieth century, she was the only Serbian female student of Anton Ažbé and Julius Exter in Munich and in the rst decade of the twentieth century Nadežda was the only Serbian artist who had le the studio and devoted herself to painting en plain air. Nadežda Petrović was also the rst who brought intensive fauvist colours and the thick pastose facture in her painting.

On the Occasion of the Jubilee

The most of Nadežda Petrović’s opus, primarily those master pieces that earned her the avant-garde status in Serbian art from the beginning of the twentieth century, are kept in the collections of the most important museums in Serbia. Therefore, the important jubilee of a hundred and y years of her birth – is celebrated with exhibitions organised in museum institutions, with her works from the collections of the National Museum of Serbia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection and the Gallery of Matica srpska in Novi Sad, as well s the Art Gallery Nadežda Petrović in Čačak. A smaller number of her works, nevertheless equally valuable, is kept in private collections, away from the general public. In their wish to represent Nadežda’s opus as completely as possible and enliven the memory of her as a personality and artist, Gallery RIMA joins the jubilee celebrations by an exhibition devoted to one painting from its private collection.

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(Complete text in printed edition)