Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Ilija Arnautović
Serbian, Yugoslav; 20th-century
Ljubljana, Slovenia: Dunajska 18
47%
Gospodarsko razstavišče. c1960 (with Milan Mihelič, Branko Simčič, and Marko Šlajmer)
This convention center suffers for the collaborative effort that went into it. It's a startling amalgam of curves and straightaways, bizarre compressions and open spaces that don't quite ever close off where they should. There are felicitous moments — as when, on the building's south side, two exterior walls and their attendant eaves and overhangs terminate into each other perpendicularly to cause a negative space which geometrical language can't quite convey — but even these have the fundamentally unresolved effect of happenstance, of accidental collisions between competing visual modes. And this is exactly what they are. (TFS, 2025)