Saturday, 16 May 2026 at noon
The Upper Floor Gallery
As part of the Subversive Festival
Curatorial concept: Dejan Kršić
Collaborators: Marko Golub and Tena Lovrenčić
Design, Socialism, Modernism: A Didactic Exhibition is based on the premise that design, visual communication, popular culture and art in the broadest sense can serve as a ‘royal road’ for analysing and interpreting the development of Yugoslav society during socialist modernisation in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey or a canon of the “greatest masterpieces” of regional design history, the exhibition approaches Yugoslav cultural production through the lens of graphic design and visual communication, exploring how the internal dynamics and tensions of social relations were reflected in visual language and artistic practice. In what way did the visual language, graphic design and artistic practices shape - and in turn become shaped by - social transformation?
The contemporary narrative about the socialist period and the art of the era is far from straightforward. It remains marked by contradiction, ambivalence and ideologically opposed interpretations. Particularly in the post-socialist context, these complexities are often reduced to clichés. Established terms such as “socialist art” and “art in socialism” often obscure more than they reveal. The former implies that all art of that period was necessarily ideologically determined and politically controlled. The latter passively depoliticises the relationship between society and art, as something that ‘simply happened’ within the social system, thereby reducing artists to mere standbyers without agency to create social transformations, negotiate and resist.
In both cases, the complex relationships between art and politics are thus blurred. The phrase “art of socialism” acknowledges that the art and design of the period emerged within dynamic relations to the socialist project of modernisation and social emancipation. Understanding the products of graphic design as material traces of a society at a particular time, the exhibition Design, Socialism, Modernism is dedicated to the relationship, changes and mutual tensions between tendencies under the names of Socialist Realism, Socialist Modernism and Socialist Aestheticism: they are well known but often vaguely defined or simplified to the point of caricature. While the split between Socialist Realism and Socialist Modernism has often been the subject of discussion, and subsequently reduced to a few frequently problematic clichés, the relationship between Socialist Modernism and Socialist Aestheticism has been far less explored.
The term “Socialist Aestheticism” was coined by literary theorist Sveta Lukić to describe changes in literature in the 1950s and 1960s. It was later occasionally used in art criticism, particularly in reflections on architecture, such as the monumental works of Bogdan Bogdanović. It also occurred in analyses of the changes in lyrical abstraction and, in particular, the commodification of radical Informel practices. In Croatian art criticism, however, this term did not gain traction, especially not in relation to graphic design, which largely remained confined within traditional oppositions: realism versus modernism, figuration versus geometric abstraction.
The subtitle “A Didactic Exhibition” directly references the historical “Didactic Exhibition of Abstract Art”, initiated in the late 1950s by a group of artists, art historians and curators gathered around the then City Gallery of Contemporary Art (today the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art). It also recalls the exhibition “Designed in Croatia - A Didactic Exhibition”, realised by Kršić in 2009 at the Gallery of the Croatian Designers’ Association. In this sense, the current exhibition continues an ongoing exploration of what the curator describes as a ‘book in the medium of an exhibition’.
Design, Socialism, Modernism: A Didactic Exhibition consists of a multitude of original works, reproductions, texts, references and footnotes “collaged” into the gallery space, creating a narrative about transformations in design, visual communication and - in a broader sense - art and society over four decades.