THE MACURA MUSEUM OF THE CONTEMPORARY ART

There is a special place located 23km north-east from Belgrade, Serbia where contemporary art lives its unique life. This place is the Macura Museum. This is the first private museum in Serbia. It was founded and opened for visits in 2008.

The founder and the owner is the collector Vladimir Macura who gathered perhaps some of the most valuable works of art created during the 20s  and the 30s of the 20th century. His collection has some of the most important examples of the modern, avant-garde art in former Yugoslavia. Macura Studied Art history in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and later he moved to Vienna (Austria) where he held a small art shop while collecting more artwork he personally liked, pursuing the dream of having a showroom or a gallery one day where he’d be able to exhibit his valuable collection. 

One day, his dream came true. The Museum was placed in a big, gray, cubic house on the bank of the Danube river. It consists of two levels, depot, living and working space, a coffee bar, and a little shop. The Museum is fenced, has its own parking lot, it is surrounded by park decorated with sculptures and there is also an orchard next to it. The sign above the entrance gate says: "To my people".

The art collection was formed according to Macura’s personal taste in art and can be divided into several units: Zenitism (this was an art movement in Yugoslavia from 1921 until 1926, first in Zagreb from 1921 to 1924 and from 1924 in Belgrade. The movement was mainly involved in visual arts, graphic design, poetry, literature, theatre, film, architecture, and music. Like other avant-garde movements at the time, it held anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and anti-nationalist views and rejected traditional culture and art. The founder, Ljubomir Micić defined the movement as "abstract metacosmic expressionism), Yugo-dada (Dragan Aleksić was the founder of this movement. He was a poet, author, journalist. From 1920 Aleksić studied Slavic languages in Prague, where he coincidentally discovered his penchant for Dadaism and incorporated it both in his speech and in the form of his written manifesto. He also wrote stories, poems, plays, and publicly declared himself a theoretician of "organic art" - orgart. In his own words, he was in contact with leading European Dadaists: Kurt Schwitters (Hannover), Raoul Hausmann, Walter Mehring, Richard Huelsenbeckom (Berlin), Max Ernst (Cologne), Tristan Tzara (Paris)), Belgrade Surrealism, Russian and Polish constructivism, Central European avant-garde, EXAT51(the name stands for Experimental Atelier and it was a group of artists and architects (1951–1956) whose program was a geometric abstraction in painting, new ways of handling of space in architecture, and the abolition of the distinction between fine and applied arts), Gorgona (Zagreb protoconceptual group. Gorgona, arranged, performed group and auto-choreographic movements, set up, posed, took photos ... All this was permeated humorby wit and paradox modeled by taking over the terminology and form of the society from which they isolated themselves by their actions), high modern, minimalism, and much more. The collection includes paintings, sculptures, installations, video works, photographs, drawings, books, objects of applied art, magazines, etc. 

You can find out more and get information about visiting hours and tickets on the official website: