17th International drawings exhibition

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka has been organizing the International Exhibition of Drawings ever since 1968. Forty years after the first exhibition, drawing returns to Rijeka, this year accompanied by animated films.
Over time, as we kept bringing forth themes that asked questions and gave answers on definitions, nature, borders and techniques of drawing, as a central axis of Rijeka exhibition's reflection, always and again we reached new and unexplored domains of using the process and product of drawing. From one year to another, international exhibition represents drawing under various lights, questioning relation between drawing and other arts, adding and updating the basic definition that "drawing is a graphic depiction of forms, exercised on any surface". Its extensive application is being observed and continuously monitored.
Norman McLaren, one of the giants of animated film, defined the latter as invisible space that exists between the drawings. In his own words:; "Animation is not art of a drawing that moves but art of movements that are being drawn. That which happens between each photogram is more important than that which is in it. Animation is, therefore, art of manipulating the invisible spaces that lay between photographs". McLaren's definition of animated film is a starting point from which we move into exploring everything that animated film and drawing are.

The basic idea of International exhibition is to collect and exhibit original drawings, and present animated films because of which this drawings were created in the first place. We wish to invite some of the authors whose works are going to be exhibited. Exhibition will go on for three months and will be accompanied with film screenings, workshops targeted at various ages and lectures on animated film, all of which will provide us a possibility of insight into actual questions and researches in this field. Herein we primarily refer to the unavoidable question of using the new techniques which, to the great extent, had their hand in animated film's realization.

Besides the central show at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, there will be few smaller (regarding the scope, not the quality) exhibitions set in Mali salon gallery, at Rijeka's main street of Korzo.

Vanja Hraste, exhibition's selector and curator