Richter Collection

Collection of Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter

In the one-storey villa on Vrhovec 38, the Collection of Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter, the work of one of the most prominent Croatian artists of the 1950s and 1960s is presented in its entirety. In 1980, Vjenceslav Richter and his wife Nada Kareš Richter donated works of art and a family house to the city of Zagreb with the intention of founding a place to study constructivist art, gather young artists, but also to encourage the spread of cultural content outside the center of Zagreb.

The Richter Collection is managed by the Museum of Contemporary Art

In 1998, the Richter Collection, as it is commonly called, was handed over to the Museum of Contemporary Art, an institution that systematically monitors artistic trends and movements from the 1920s through EXAT in the 1950s, the international movement New Tendencies of the 1960s to New Forms. art today. This was the beginning of intensive work on the professional processing of Vjenceslav Richter's works of art, but also the close cooperation between the museum's curator and the artist, aimed at creating the conditions for opening the collection to the public. At the initiative of the Museum and donors, a park was arranged in which sculptures were placed, and the ground floor of the villa was converted into an exhibition space intended for a permanent exhibition of donated works. In the spring of 2000, the Collection was opened to the public, and the close collaboration between Vjenceslav Richter and the Museum continued with the artist's dedicated expansion of the donation to new works. In 2007, Nada Kareš Richter expanded the donation with valuable archival material and a library that is kept and professionally processed in the premises of the Collection.

About Vjenceslav Richter

Vjeceslav Richter is one of the founders of the EXAT 51 group, whose activities began in 1951, and in fact he dedicated his entire creative life to exploring new possibilities in architecture, painting and sculpture, striving for the synthesis of all the arts. In the fifties and sixties, he realized a number of successful projects of exhibition pavilions – in Brussels, Turin and Milan, with which he achieved international success, and then worked on projects for museums in Aleppo, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Skopje and Krapina. In the mid-1960s, one of the most original projects, Sinturbanism, began, which he further developed in the theoretical project of Heliopolis, a four-dimensional city of millions. In the 1970s and 1980s, he often designed family homes that gave him great freedom of creative expression.

Experimenting in the field of fine arts connected him with the international movement New Tendencies. During this period, the series of works Centers and Centers, System Sculptures, Reliefometers, System Graphics and Spatial Graphics emerged from Richter's fascination with systems and his preoccupation with the idea of the possibility of synthesis in the field of fine arts. In about thirty works of the Spatial Painting cycle, created only in the late 1990s, the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and painting have been erased.

A series of works in which Richter moves away from a solid geometric structure Spontaneous Drawing, Spontaneous Graphics, Free Drawing, and Gravitational Drawing originated in the late 1970s, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, the Collection houses 182 works of art created in the period from 1964 to 2002, which follow all areas of Richter's art, and some of the donated works are presented in the permanent exhibition of the ground floor of the house and the associated sculpture park.

Information

Collection manager: Vesna Meštrić (vesna.mestric@msu.hr)

Working hours: Wednesday and Saturday: 11 am – 4 pm (other days with prior notice on tel. 01/6052 700 or 01/3704 892)

Ticket price: 10 kuna