The Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro announces the opening of the exhibition “Departments of Poetry: Paper, Mirror, Photograph” by renowned artist Vlado Martek, one of the most significant representatives of post-avant-garde art with an international reputation. 

The exhibition will be officially opened on Thursday, March 13, at 7 PM at the MSUCG Gallery. 

 This is a unique opportunity to gain deeper insight into the historical significance of the artist’s work and his decades-long artistic practice. 

 The exhibition includes works from Martek’s earliest periods, when he was part of the well-known post-avant-garde Zagreb-based Group of Six Authors (Mladen Stilinović, Vlado Martek, Željko Jerman, Boris Demur, Sven Stilinović, and Fedor Vučemilović), to pieces created after the 2000s. 

 Throughout his career, Martek has remained committed to a transmedial approach, continuously exploring and combining different artistic media. 

In the spirit of what the artist himself states – ‘I have no identity of any medium’ – the exhibition’s curators, Neva Lukić and Teodora Nikčević, emphasize that this exhibition is designed to fluctuate between media and materials. 

 In the exhibition’s accompanying text, they write: ‘Although Martek’s conclusions and slogans are often very simple, the foundation for this simplicity lies in a deeply layered reading knowledge. Martek is, above all, a reader, as evidenced by the fact that he studied comparative literature and philosophy and spent his working life in a library. From this invisible foundation, the artist has explored poetry through various creative phases, which he continuously revisits. These phases can be categorized into classical poetry, which he primarily wrote in his early years before forming the Group of Six Authors; then pre-poetry, emerging in the late 1970s within the group, incorporating various post-conceptual and post-avant-garde “preparations for poetry”; and finally, post-poetry from the mid-1980s, which includes visual poetry, painting, drawing, assemblage, text, and photography.’

As a special segment of the exhibition, during the opening, the artist will perform an action in which he will distribute biscuits with the inscription “Lie to the State,” continuing his long-standing practice of subversive and socially engaged artistic gestures.