Abstract
<jats:p>The book Desires and Contradictions: Exhibiting Art and Architecture in Slovenia 1947–1979 explores and interprets art and architecture through the prism of how it was exhibited and institutionalised in the selected period. The period is framed by two exhibitions which, through their organisation, content orientation, the selection of works and the responses they elicited, reflect the historical situation of their time. The first is the 1947 Exhibition of Soviet Painters (Razstava sovjetskih slikarjev), presented in the still officially unopened premises of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. The exhibition toured the Yugoslav republics and the countries of the Eastern Bloc and represents an important event for the understanding of the brief period of the Yugoslav rapprochement to the Soviet Union in the field of art, which was interrupted as early as June 1948 with Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. Intended as an example of the art of Socialist Realism, the exhibition failed to convince at least part of the Slovenian expert public. The second exhibition, the large retrospective Slovenian Fine Arts 1945–1978 (Slovenska likovna umetnost 1945–1978), was prepared in 1979 by the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana and the Architectural Museum Ljubljana. It presented a broad spectrum of architecture, design and art – from figurative memorial sculptures and book illustrations to the projects by The OHO Group – yet through its specific mode of presentation and interpretation, it also importantly reinforced the evaluation of achievements according to the criteria of the Western canon and confirmed modernism as the most important current of Slovenian artistic production during the period under consideration. By opening up towards postmodernism favourable to regionalism – which, in contrast to modernist internationalism, once again popularised the search for the genius loci – and by consolidating the perception of the Slovenian cultural space as a distinct entity within the Yugoslav context, it symbolically opened a new chapter of the 1980s.</jats:p>