In 2026, the National Museum of Modern Art continues presenting its collection outside its home venue through the NMMU on Tour programme. In this context, the exhibition Composition opens on 12 March at the Gallery of Fine Arts of the City of Slavonski Brod, curated by Museum Advisor Željko Marciuš.
The exhibition offers a considered overview of the form of painting in Croatian art from post-war high modernism to contemporary postmodernism. Through selected works by different generations of artists, it traces the development of abstract thought in painting and the process of abstracting the world on the path toward the “pure image.” The curator emphasizes that composition becomes the key site where form and meaning intersect, where contraction and calm, action and silence shape a dynamic and multilayered pictorial field.
In the accompanying text, Željko Marciuš writes, among other things: (…) The exhibition addresses formal elements, highlighting the relationships between parts and the whole through which the painter seeks compositional harmony. It concerns a method of reducing visual content toward the pure image and pure painting. By projecting inner experience onto the motif, artists grant the form of the image an added value that reflects the profound purpose of finding or losing the self—an inner center that the artist projects onto the viewer through the painting. (…)
Artists: Milivoj Bijelić, Nina Ivančić, Julije Knifer, Vladimir Kristl, Edo Murtić, Zoltan Novak, Šime Perić, Ivan Picelj, Frano Šimunović, Stipan Tadić.
The exhibition has been realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and remains on view at the Gallery of Fine Arts of the City of Slavonski Brod until 9 April 2026.

Reproductions from left to right: (1) Edo Murtić, Green Calm, 1965, oil on canvas, 81 × 130 cm, MG-2655; (2) Frano Šimunović, Leaving the Darkness, 1977, oil on canvas, 110 × 164 cm, MG-3976. (3) Zoltan Novak, Ecce Homo II, 1992, oil, metal, wood, canvas, 130 × 130 cm, MG-6320A
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb