Gustav Klimt arrived in Klović's court

This is a collaboration with the Museum of the City of Rijeka

The exhibition project "Unknown Klimt – Love, Death, Ecstasy" by Deborah Pustišek Antić, senior curator of the Museum of the City of Rijeka, was presented to the Rijeka audience on April 29, 2021 in the Sugar Palace. The exhibition, conceived in 2014, has thus become one of the key moments of the Rijeka ECOC 2020 project.

This unique exhibition brought the audience closer to the early works of one of the most famous artists of all time: Gustav Klimt. The word "approached" can be taken literally, since it is a painting made by Gustav and Ernst Klimt , and their collaborator and friend Franz Matsch for the vault of the Rijeka Theater Ivan pl. Rabbit.

There are a total of nine paintings : three paintings are early works by Gustav Klimt (St. Cecilia, Anthony and Cleopatra and Orpheus and Eurydice), three by his brother Ernst (Allegory of Theater Arts, Genius with Trumpet and Genius with a Basket of Flowers), and three paintings were painted by Franz Matsch (Allegory of Love Poetry, Allegory of Dance and Allegory of Comic Opera). Although Rijeka's paintings in the development of Klimt's art are at the very beginning, they reveal the hand of a skilled master who in the first decade of his career, from 1880 to 1890, developed between the two sexes – on the one hand strongly influenced by schooling at the School of Arts and Crafts. others influenced by the then most popular Viennese painter Hans McCarthy, whose follower was considered by contemporaries for his virtuosity and ease of painting and coloristic boldness.

The exhibition project "Klimt in Rijeka – Love, Death, Ecstasy" is a unique opportunity for the Rijeka and Zagreb audiences to get to know the early, lesser-known part of the work of one of the world's most famous artists. Thoroughly preserved and restored in the Rijeka and Zagreb departments of the Croatian Conservation Institute, these valuable works now seem to have just arrived from a Viennese painting workshop, so visitors can take a closer look at fine Klimt brush strokes they could not see before.