At the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, a major retrospective pays homage to Mira Brtka

Until September 8, 2024, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome pays tribute to Serbian artist Mira Brtka (Novi Banovci, 1930) with the exhibition The Future is behind us, curated by Miroslav Rodic, director of the Mira Brtka Foundation in Belgrade, Ludovica Rossi Purini and Angelo Bucarelli, and realized thanks to the coordination of the Mira Brtka Foundation in Belgrade and the Director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome Renata Cristina Mazzantini, under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and the Italian Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition is part of the extensive program of initiatives envisaged in the Agreement on Cultural Cooperation and Education between the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the Government of the Republic of Italy approved in 2012, which provides in Art. 2 “Cooperation in the artistic sector, through the exchange of artists and professionals in the artistic sector,” and in Art. 6 “The organization of cultural and artistic events in a wide variety of fields: literature, visual arts, architecture, performing arts, music, dance, theater, cinema and audiovisual.” With this retrospective Mira Brtka virtually returns to Rome, where she lived in the 1960s, definitively combining her two passions: art and cinema, as well as political engagement.

In the catalog Angelo Bucarelli writes: “Fate is always stronger than all intentions: Mira, Maria, Brtka was to be an artist. And she was, well-rounded, multifaceted, energetic, determined, enlightened. One of the most interesting protagonists of the postwar art scene and certainly not only Serbian. Directed by her interest in architecture, after high school she would like to enroll in that university, by chance she lands in film (...). Although totally unprepared she is admitted for her intellectual verve. She is already Mira Brtka.”

And we start from here to frame the restless but also socially active artist. Her influence of the time was greater, perhaps, than her own renown, just think of how the fashion world became fond of Mira’s colors and geometries as well as very important directors such as Alberto Lattuada, Pietro Germi, and Paolo Pietrangeli wanted her as a set designer on their sets.

In the introductory text to the catalog, director Renata Cristina Mazzantini writes: “The artist, in fact, moved to Italy in 1959 following her passion for cinema. He arrived in the magnificent Rome of the 1960s, in that ’Hollywood on the Tiber’ that knew how to attract before globalization many talents from abroad, in a multicultural temperament that today seems unrepeatable.” He continues: “The exhibition, therefore, reveals the relationship with the Eternal City of the Balkan artist, who always maintained a strong bond with the capital, even after 1970, when he returned to Yugoslavia. It also brings to life, in this way, the history of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, then at the center of a world in which art, cinema and fashion were intertwined, gradually transforming the setting of the Dolce vita into the stage for the socio-cultural battles of the Sixty-eight, from the second feminism to activism.”

Subjected to historical elaboration and valorization today, Mira Brtka’s overall contribution is a complex interpretive task, especially since, for an adequate understanding of its genesis, it is necessary to keep in mind a specific cultural context such as the emergence of the Illumination group on the art scene in Rome in the late 1960s. Thus, Brtka’s composite oeuvre can be thought of as placing her among the very first multimedia - and therefore avant-garde - artists because of this mixing of painting, collage, sculpture, objects, installations, fashion, film, animation and political activism. The exhibition’s co-curator, Ludovica Rossi Purini, writes in the catalog, “Her meeting with Giulio Carlo Argan, Mayor of Rome at the time, her fruitful friendship with Nobuya Abe, Marcia Hafif, Milena Cubrakovic, Aldo Schmid and Paolo Patelli, with whom she formed the Illumination group, pushed her more and more to reflect on her own artistic identity and on the artist’s ’duty to be’ an active protagonist of contemporary social and political debate. This devotion to activism will not only remain linked to Brtka’s artistic expressiveness but will also condition her existence as reflected in her membership in 1975 in the Bureau for Preventive Imagination that had been created by Italian artists and activists a few years earlier.” He continues: “The 1960s in particular, during which Brtka was most present in Rome, working both in the film industry as an assistant to important directors such as Alberto Lattuada and Pietro Germi and as a set designer also in animated films, and studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, were characterized by conceptual poetics and minimalist and performative ones. The work of the Yugoslavian artist does not depart from this groove but rather reaffirms it by ranging from post-informal to an analytical painting, from surface control to neocoloristic practice.”

“The exhibition,” says director Mazzantini, “fully illustrates the complexity and richness of this research and its extraordinary femininity. It documents an inexhaustible creative vein, which from the almost Zen-like monochromatic purity of the White Paintings moves on to the overwhelming and exciting use of color, in the canvases and collages; which from welded sculpture comes to linear wire sculpture, which from the Works with Embroideries leads seamlessly to fashion design. It pays homage to an emblematic Serbian figure of the second half of the 20th century, in the admirable exhibition setting designed by Professor Franco Purini.”

“Some 65 years ago Mira Brtka lived in Rome,” says President of the Mira Brtka Foundation in Belgrade Miroslav Rodic. “This time is long enough to finally allow us to make a posthumous critical analysis of Mira Brtka’s diverse artistic universe. That is why we wanted to undertake the process of reaffirming and enhancing her work and Mira’s place in contemporary European art. And it is also for this reason that we await with extreme interest to verify the reactions of the insiders and the public who will visit the exhibition in the wonderful spaces of the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Valle Giulia in Rome.”

At the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, a major retrospective pays homage to Mira Brtka

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