Iva Despić Simonović was born in Hrastovica near Petrinja in 1891. Upon completion of primary and junior high school, Iva, who always showed affinity towards artistic expression, is enrolled in the Crafts Course for Girls at the Crafts School in Zagreb, and when the Course was discontinued in 1908, she enrolled in the College of Arts and Crafts.

Bosnian-Herzegovinian public is familiar with Thomas Steyaert as a dancer and choreographer. This exhibition will present him as a painter. His mixed-media work is a playful reflection on power structures and pain caused by violent political and economical systems. The distorted and cartoonish characters in Steyaert’s paintings often represent the obscene behavior of egocentric capitalist figures with a minimum on empathic understanding. The abstract works evolved from a pure fascination with texture, color and different printing techniques. The pieces seen at the exhibition were created with a self-thought technique by using oil paint, acrylic and spray paint on insulating foam boards.

The National Gallery of BiH has the honor and unique opportunity to organize, in cooperation with the Serbian Cultural and Educational Society “Prosvjeta” Sarajevo, another large retrospective exhibition of Branko Šotra’s works, after almost thirty years from the last one. This artist was primarily represented in the Yugoslav art history as a graphic artist, especially with the opus created during the last fifteen years of his life (1945-1960), so his paintings did not receive sufficient expert recognition. His works in the field of woodcarving, iconography and wall painting are even less known.

Mica Todorović’s drawings (1929-1933) represent an isolated example within an entire artistic opus both in thematic and expressive terms, but at the same time they occupy an important place in the segment of Bosnian-Herzegovinian social art. Looking at her entire opus, these works can be considered a stage of artistic maturation and growing up. They bear a strong criticism in themselves, but it is not directly addressed to any particular time or to any particular ideology. By confronting biblical motifs with the contemporary world, the artist emphasizes the universality of human mistakes. These drawings refine simultaneously both the reflections of collective consciousness, and responsibility and individuality of her personal attitude.

November 22, 2018 – January 15, 2019   Sometimes one painting, bought or received as a gift, is enough to create the passion and desire to acquire one more, and…