Beyond the Boundaries: Art Outside Museums

Beyond the Boundaries is a project which takes art outside museums and represents it to passers-by, awarding people and the city at the same time but also creating new and attractive forms of artistic expression that inspire and bring back optimism.

In the period ending with 27^th November, the Zagreb Tourist Board in cooperation with the association Nas dve (“the two of us” in Croatian) carries out an innovative project which takes art outside museums and brings it closer to the audience. The project connects three city museums: the Art Pavilion, the Museum of Arts and Crafts and the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery. This is a way for artists to speak about the present moment but also to continue the joint life of visitors and museums, which was disrupted by the pandemic, but also by a strong earthquake which hit Zagreb on 22^nd March this year.

All of these events had an impact on the content of museum exhibits. Within the framework of this project, chosen artists selected representative and recognisable motifs from a museum which inspired them to create original content outside of the museum walls. In this manner the facades of the museums and spaces that surround them got a new function; they became walls to present artwork and therefore changed the image of the city but also gave an opportunity to its artists.

The Museum of Arts and Crafts and the School of Applied Arts and Design host the art installation Hommage to Bollé whose author is Ida Blažičko. This is an intervention on the façade of the historicist palace built between 1887 and 1891 in the spirit of the German neo-Renaissance dedicated to the architect Herman Bollé, famous for being a restorer and builder of Zagreb after a devastating earthquake in 1880. This installation was inspired by biomorph motifs that can be seen in the Museum of Arts and Crafts and what was once the Craft School and is now the School of Applied Arts and Design. 

New landscape by artists Maša Barišić and Jelena Malenica is the title of a metal sculpture, growing for a month, slowly covering the steps at the entrance of the Art Pavilion, which was temporarily closed after the earthquake. This is a reminder of a natural disaster which becomes a garden covered with plants, with metal ivy, which is a symbol of life and art that still lives and blooms, even in impossible conditions, just like a self-seeding plant. Maša Barišić is the author of another project at the same location. Its title is Temporarily closed describing the state that some od Zagreb’s museums and galleries are in, among which is the Art Pavilion. Currently it is not open to visitors. However, the building is becoming an art piece through an intervention of the artist. Lights coming from the inside, pulsating in the rhythm of the heart, means in the artist’s language that museums and buildings have their identity and soul and that even though it is temporarily closed, the Art Pavilion lives on. 

Owing to the artwork by Boris Bare and Ivo Gašparić, the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery and the Gradec Gallery will become the setting of an art project entitled Outside. Large, framed paintings whose motifs are inspired by the art pieces of the Klovićevi dvori Gallery leave the gallery and adorn the rundown façade of the Gradec Gallery, turning it into an exhibition wall. Oversized sculptures represent the audience which is an integral part of the exhibition. It also encompasses passers-by who intended or did not intend to be there. In such a way, they become a part of the artwork.