Nande Vidmar: A Retrospective

Painter, graphic artist and sketcher Nande Vidmar (1899-1981) is considered one of the key personalities in the visual arts in Slovenia in the 20th century. Despite numerous exhibitions and references in literature, he was profoundly introduced to the public only once with retrospective exhibition in the City Museum of Ljubljana (1989). An impulse for the artist‘s most comprehensive presentation until now, reaches to the year 2017, when preparations for the exhibition Faces of Expressionism began. Mišo Vidmar, his son and owner of majority of artist‘s oeuvre, emphasized the heterogeneity of his father‘s work, such as expressionist, new and social realism artworks that were created during 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, his paintings and drawings from 1950s and 1960s were tucked away in artist‘s apartment in Ljubljana far from the public eye. They belong to his mature and late phase when he lived in the capital and had withdrawn from society. A picturesque journey organised through exhibition spaces highlights artist‘s immanent characteristics. The core of Vidmar’s interest is human and artist‘s own environment. Both defined his mentality and emotions in different periods of history. The exhibition begins with drawings from his youth from the end of WW I and finishes with his last painting Abandoned Wall (1971).

Curator: dr. Robert Simonišek

Photo: Maruša Lapuh, GBJ archive