Kunstschätze

This year, the Infeld Cultural Center in Dobrinj is showing a cross-section of representative works from the Infeld Collection.

From over 3000 works collected over the past fifteen years, around 140 works by 42 artists have been selected. It is part of the collection strategy to increasingly acquire groups of works rather than isolated individual works in order to facilitate a complex understanding of the artistic idea.

The establishment of a private art collection is also a contribution to the preservation of cultural assets for future generations. An example of this in the Infeld Collection is the work of the Croatian naïve painter Ivan Generalic called "Hanged Cock" (1959). Ivan Generalic talks about his key work: "I plucked this rooster myself. And hung it myself and prepared it for painting. I wanted to show Death hanging across a dramatic sky. There is no landscape here - only the clouds, which give the picture an even more dramatic expression of death. Perhaps this picture contains a little symbolism: even in our beautiful nature such dramas often occur."

Another highlight of the exhibition are seven works from the series "The Umbrellas of Opatija" by the world-famous and esteemed Croatian painter Zlatko Prica, who lived and worked in Rijeka. Created in the 1990s, these images observe the mystery of women: their elegance, their character, their movements.

A private collection of contemporary art also documents the works of this period with a sense of responsibility for their social significance. An example of this is the picture "Theater" (1948/50) by Wolfgang Hutter. It is regarded as a key to Hutter's paintings and world of ideas, as his first large-scale, carefully designed pictorial synthesis. A performance in the open air, in the midst of a strange stage architecture, is depicted. The fabulous theatrical reality flows into an architectural backdrop that could be any street. The whole world in Hutter's work becomes a theatrical event, a substitute pretense. Being and fiction are barely distinguishable. That's how it used to be, that's how it still is today. As Arthur Schnitzler wrote: "We all play, those who know it are wise."

Another important representative of the Austrian art scene of the last decades is represented with several works - Walter Schmögner. His unmistakable shaky stroke and his penchant for the bizarre, for irony and sarcasm distinguish the artistic loner.

Walter Schmögner loves people and tries to understand them - also and especially when he elevates their weaknesses and unfathomable passions to the topic of art.

The transformation and the life cycle have a universal value in Schmögner's work. The decay of fruits and vegetables often inspires him. When he was commissioned in 1986 to design an Austrian commemorative stamp, he thought of a rotting pear, which almost caused a scandal.