EXHIBITION 8

SAVA SEKULIĆ

25.4.2026 – 18.7.2026

You are cordially invited to the opening on Friday, April 24, from 6 – 9 pm.

A man is a teacher, an educator and a parent, but not a creator.

I am not the master or creator of my own work.

Nature is the Creator, and she speaks through me.

Sava Sekulić is a painter and poet.

Childhood memories inform his works: portraits of his family, of neighbors and folk heroes, whose stories were passed down in the village community. He paints the animals that surrounded him, that nourished him or with whom he lived under one roof—horses, oxen, cows, goats, and pigs—as well as plants, without blossoms yet lushly green and brimming with life. He often lets humans, animals, and plants blend into one another, then fuses them into a single whole. Sekulić paints a community that functions only when all its members come together, that draws its strength from their interplay.

His architectural depictions make for a sharp contrast: they are drawn not from memory but from how he imagines cities. He paints large residential complexes, veritable concrete deserts, molded to the shapes of their names: New York, Rome, or London. Less frequently, they appear in the guise of an animal, such as a deer. These may be Sekulić’s attempts to breathe life into the cold architectures. Yet even in living form, the buildings remain uninhabited and anonymous.

Why did I start writing?

And why did I undertake to be born?

My poetry is natural.

Sekulić teaches himself to read and write at the age of thirty. His learning is not guided by the structure of a school, it proceeds through the very act of speaking: Sekulić writes as he hears. That is why his texts possess a unique and straightforward poetic quality in which the immediacy of the spoken word and his own thinking resonates. Language and writing take on a central role in his output. He accompanies each painting with a text, usually on the back of the picture. Drawings are often covered with writing on both sides—with poems and thoughts that he strings together, pursuing associations, and that serve him as templates for his paintings or future poems.

Even by loveliness my life was poisoned.

Sava Sekulić is born in Bilišane, a small village in the Kingdom of Dalmatia (now Croatia), in 1902. He is surrounded by meadows, forests, and lakes, and the sea is not far off. As a child, he tends livestock; he does not attend school. When he is ten, his father dies. Before passing away, he urges his son—whose special gift he perhaps senses—to teach himself to draw and write. For Sekulić, his father’s words are a guiding light that will stay with him until the end of his life. His mother remarries, and he is raised by relatives. When he is just fourteen years old, Sekulić is drafted into World War I, to fight on the side of Hungary and Austria against Italy. He sustains such severe injuries in combat that he returns home in 1918 having lost sight in his right eye. He is no longer welcome in his village, which has been occupied by the Italians. Sekulić leaves his homeland and sets out on a journey. What follows is a turbulent life full of hardship and strokes of misfortune. He earns his living with various jobs: as a day laborer, farmhand, logger, housepainter, and finally, bricklayer. His earliest poems likely date from the beginning of the 1930s—around the time of the deaths of his first wife and their child. He soon starts painting as well. His entire budding oeuvre is lost during a move to Belgrade in 1943.

After retiring in 1962, he can finally devote himself entirely to his art; he now spends entire nights writing and painting. Sekulić creates a dense and rich oeuvre of paintings, objects, drawings, sketches, and writings. In 1964, he joins the Cultural and Artistic Society in Belgrade and participates in the annual exhibitions in the gallery of the local Đuro Salaj University—a Yugoslav institution dedicated to educating and advancing the working class. In 1968, Sekulić is awarded first prize there for his works—it is this moment that marks the beginning of his career as an artist. From now on, his works are shown in solo and group exhibitions; initially at venues in Yugoslavia and, beginning in 1986, abroad as well, in Munich, London, New York, and elsewhere.

Why did I start painting?

I wanted in this way to show the people who belittled and ridiculed me what I have in my mind.

That’s why I wrote and painted, not in others’ way but in my own.

Throughout his life, the artist signs his works with the Cyrillic letters CCC, the abbreviation for “Sava Sekulić, autodidact.” Sekulić dies in Belgrade in 1989.

Sava Sekulić is brought to Charlotte Zander’s attention by the Croatian art historian Vladimir Crnković in 1978, and she starts to systematically collect and exhibit his works. In 1993, she edits the comprehensive catalogue raisonné of his paintings. A large part of his oeuvre, encompassing over 1,000 works, is now in the Zander Collection.

Supported by

Passages

14.3. – 17.5.2026

Nat Faulkner | Solomon Garçon | Keta Gavasheli | Gaylen Gerber mit Leah Ke Yi Zheng | Hervé Guibert | Nour Mobarak | Henrik Olesen | B. Ingrid Olson | Anastasia Pavlou | Matthew Peers | Cora Pongracz | Pope.L | Ariana Reines und Oscar Tuazon | Dieter Roth | Sava Sekulić

Passages is an exhibition about the mutability of matter and form. While questions of form often concern how material is endowed with, or given form, the exhibition likewise attends to the existential dimension embedded within a larger notion of form. The moment in which something takes form is often also the moment in which an existence or presence is suggested, while conversely the dissolution of form often involves disappearance, loss, or even destruction. Moments of making and unmaking form alternate in this exhibition, presenting works that resist being captured as either fully “stable form” or as formless, existing somewhere in between. They create form while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of its dissolution, as if reflecting a fundamental instability. Even if we encounter objects in this exhibition, its focus lies less on a fixed shape, but on a shift, and on the potential for transformation. Matter is considered as a site of change, encompassing both physical and psychological “matter”. At its centre are works that embody a change of state – from one material to another, from one temporality to another, from one appearance to another. Sometimes it is anarchic and disintegrating forces that bring about these transformations, while at others, it is simply the passing of time and with it a kind of withering or evanescence.

Curated by Kathrin Bentele. On loan from the Zander Collection, the work The Army of General Franchet d’Espèrey (1976) by Sava Sekulić is on display.

Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg
Petit-Rames 22
Postfach 294
1701 Fribourg
Switzerland

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Charlotte Zander:
COLLECTOR, GALLERIST, MUSEUM FOUNDER

10.10.25 – 25.9.26

Milestone Cooperation on Self-Taught and Outsider Artists’ Work in Cologne. The Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek and ZADIK Receive Major Gifts from the Zander Collection

In 1997, Charlotte Zander was the first woman to be honored with the ART COLOGNE Award for her formidable dedication to “naïve art.” Twenty-eight years later, the documentation and scholarly study of the works of self-taught and outsider artists are firmly established in Cologne, with permanent representation at three venues: last fall, the nonprofit Zander Collection inaugurated an exhibition space in Cologne where exhibitions of works from the collection are held on a regular basis. Susanne Zander now gifts the internationally unrivaled specialized library with literature on the collection’s themes to the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek Köln (KMB), where scholars can access it effective immediately. Meanwhile, the collector, gallery owner, and museum founder Charlotte Zander’s archive has been entrusted to ZADIK, where it is being made accessible to researchers. ZADIK is preparing a thematically focused exhibition, which will open in 2025.

Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, director of ZADIK, is delighted: “In the extensive archival material documenting Charlotte Zander’s work, ZADIK now possesses a stock of high-quality sources providing insight into her collection-building activities going back to the 1950s. Because she turned her personal passion into a profession, founding a gallery and, later, a museum, the archive also enables us to learn more about the international networks of dealers and museums handling and showcasing ‘naïve art.’”

Susanne Zander, CEO of Sammlung Zander, is confident that the gifts have opened up new avenues of access to the work of self-taught and outsider artists for specialists and the broader public alike: “One objective of our work with the Zander Collection is to facilitate and promote scholarly engagement with this art. We want to establish Cologne as a central setting of such research. The gifts, which also encompass my personal extensive library on so-called outsider art, are a vital step toward this goal. We are moreover developing new projects involving the collection that embed our exhibitions in diverse discursive and scholarly contexts.”

Elke Purpus, director of the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek, is inviting the interested public to come and start reading: “We have already entered 2,449 publications into our online catalogue—the work is almost complete. We look forward to welcoming many visitors wishing to consult the Zander Library.”

Bringing both an archive and the related specialized library to Cologne is a model that ZADIK and the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek have successfully implemented in a series of instances. They underscore its advantages: “It is only a short walk from one institution to the other, enabling scholars to take full advantage of the two related sets of holdings—a collaboration we intend to consolidate and expand on.”