Symbol of Group June, photography 1973 © Stane Jagodic
Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana Grad Fužine Pot na Fužine 2 1000 Ljubljana Slovénie
Selection of Photographs from International Art Collection Junij
« Grupa Junij » (The June Group) was founded by a group of artists who completed their studies at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Art around 1970. After 1976 the group became international and the individual artists, who were more than pleased by the group’s activities, willingly donated their work, thus laying the foundations for the emergence of the « Junij » International Art Collection (JIAC). It was officially founded in 1980. In 1996 the « Junij » Society bequeathed the collection to the Ljubljana Museum of Architecture and Design, where it has been kept ever since.
The collection consists of 1,300 works by more than 140 artists from 30 countries (30 artists are from Slovenia). It features photographs, mixed media, graphic prints, drawings, caricatures, and even a few paintings and sculptures. The collection was set up mostly by the members of « Grupa Junij », particularly Stane Jagodič, as well as some artists from abroad.
The emergence of the collection can be understood as a unique artistic and curatorial project that heralded tectonic shifts in 20th century art: the break with the ideological uniformity of modernism and transition to the pluralism of post-modernism.
The photography part of the collection is still regarded the best overview of European photographic creativity of the 1970s and early 1980s in Slovenian public collections. The stylistic and conceptual range of the JIAC starts with formalism and minimalism, subjective photography and documents of various conceptual, Land Art, and performance practices, continues with meta-fiction analysis and ends with fantastic and surrealist figuralism that points to a re-emergence of the imagination as a creative principle and to the birth of a new figuralism. The selection on display features 59 photographers (62 counting their associates) and over 100 photographs.
Selectors: Miha Colnar, Photon, and Primož Lampič, Museum of Architecture and Design.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95 © Christo, Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Vignette © Stane Jagodic
