The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade marks its 60th anniversary with the opening of the exhibition Turning Points to Modernity: Art of Society 1900–1945, on Saturday, October 18, 2025, at 5 p.m. The exhibition, which will remain on view for the next two years, inaugurates a new long-term curatorial cycle through which the Museum will reaffirm the significance of its collection in three major exhibitions, encompassing artworks created from 1900 to the present day.
The first chapter of this cycle, Turning Points to Modernity: Art of Society 1900–1945, offers a layered reading of the shaping of art in Serbia and Yugoslavia during the first half of the twentieth century. Through more than 400 works by 150 artists, the Museum presents its collection not as a linear sequence of styles, but as a living legacy that continues to shape our understanding of art and society.
The exhibition guides visitors through a series of chapters that intertwine historical timelines with broader phenomena and themes that transcend a single era. The chronological thread leads from the first modernist gestures at the turn of the century, through avant-garde experiments that opened new fields of expression, to the artistic practices of the 1930s reflecting social divisions, introspective searches, and lyrical explorations of the time.
Parallel to this historical narrative, a thematic layer unfolds — one that focuses on cultural and sociological phenomena in which the city and urban identity emerge as chroniclers of modernization, as well as on the artistic media themselves: portraiture as the “face of the epoch,” movement as an inquiry into form and the body, and sculpture and relief as explorations of spatial expression.
In this way, the exhibition reveals art not only as an aesthetic field but also as a record of political, social, and cultural transformation.
A special segment of the exhibition is the Portrait of an Artist series — a sequence of focused presentations devoted to key figures of pre-war modernism, including Petar Dobrović, Sava Šumanović, Milena Pavlović Barilli, Ljuba Ivanović, Nadežda Petrović, Dušan Jovanović Đukin, Risto Stijović, and Sreten Stojanović.
The curatorial concept, developed by Mišela Blanuša, Dr. Rajka Bošković, and Žaklina Ratković, presents the collection as an active dialogue between art and society through carefully selected examples of some of its most significant works. In doing so, the Museum reaffirms both the value of its collection and its primary mission — the preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage.