color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">On the occasion of the 110th anniversary of the birth of Vojin Bakić, one of the most significant Croatian sculptors of the 20th century, the newly renovated City Museum of Bjelovar will open the exhibition Vojin Bakić: The Principle of Hopeon Thursday, 29 January 2026. This is the first comprehensive presentation of Bakić’s life and work in his hometown after sixty years.

The exhibition is curated by Hana Ćurak, an anthropologist and researcher, who developed the concept at the invitation of—and in dialogue with—the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom / WHW (Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović). The exhibition design was created by architects Ana Martina Bakić and Vjera Bakić, heirs to the artist’s estate. An integral part of the exhibition includes works by artists David Maljković, Miloš Trakilović, and Sara Salamon. The exhibition remains open until 18 April 2026.

The exhibition begins with the question: what does the work of Vojin Bakić mean today, at a moment marked by intensified historical revisionism and the systematic suppression of public memory? Living and working in conditions shaped by war, political upheavals, and profound social transformations, Bakić developed an artistic language grounded in ideas of solidarity, collective responsibility, and hope for a more just society. His practice was deeply marked by the murder of his four younger brothers in the Jadovno concentration camp system; yet despite this trauma, Bakić refused despair. His sculptures persistently sought a form capable of sustaining the conviction that such violence must never happen again.

What distinguishes this exhibition from previous presentations of Bakić’s work is its emphasis on collective curatorial authorship (WHW and the Bakić family together with Hana Ćurak), an innovative theoretical framework, and a strong focus on the family context and the city in which the artist grew up. By insisting on an ethical reading of hope, the continuity of values Bakić upheld, and the ongoing reflection on the (im)possibility of a new social imaginary, the exhibition expands the museum framework and activates it as a method of shared learning. Through an intervention in Bakić’s birthplace, located in the immediate vicinity of the Museum and soon to be reconstructed as the Bakić House, the exhibition positions Bjelovar as one of the key sites for archival, disciplinary, and spatial readings of Bakić’s work.

The exhibition design by Ana Martina and Vjera Bakić unfolds across three museum galleries—in the basement, ground floor, and first floor—offering an overview of the key phases of Bakić’s artistic production, with particular emphasis on the cycles Light-Bearing Forms (1963–1968) and Foliated Forms (1958). Alongside major representative works, including various iterations of the sculptures Bull and Torso, a rarely exhibited sculpture, Simultaneities (1968–1969), is also presented. The exhibition includes works from the collection of the City Museum of Bjelovar, most notably the remains of the original Monument to the Executed / Call to the Uprising (The Bjelovar Native), created in 1947 in memory of the artist’s brother Slobodan Bakić, who was killed at an early age and whose monument was later destroyed by mining. A replica of the monument was reinstalled in 2010 in Borik Memorial Park, in the Vojnović district of Bjelovar, through the joint efforts of the artist’s family, friends, and collaborators, in cooperation with state and local institutions and associations.

Artists invited to participate in the exhibition and to engage in dialogue with Bakić’s legacy include David Maljković—whose long-term engagement with Bakić’s modernist monuments is articulated, among other works, in Retired Form(2009) and the trilogy Scenes for a New Heritage (2004–2006)—as well as younger-generation artists Miloš Trakilović and Sara Salamon. The contemporary positions presented in the exhibition take up key tensions in Bakić’s work: between violence and possibility, archive and future, body and progress, translating them into the present of digital images, migration, and ecological crisis. In doing so, they open Bakić’s work toward new social imaginaries and younger audiences.

Bakić’s creative approach and the universal messages of his art—directed toward light and forward movement—embody hope as a principle. Accordingly, rather than offering a linear overview of Bakić’s oeuvre, the exhibition draws on the philosophy of hope developed by Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and the practice of critical fabulation articulated by historian Saidiya Hartman. For Bloch, hope is not an emotion but a mode of thinking: the ability to recognize possibilities for change within the present. From this perspective, Bakić’s sculptural practice—composed of abstract forms, dynamism, light reflection, and kinetic potential—can be read as a materialization of anticipatory thinking. His sculptures reject closed, finalized images of reality and instead offer form as an argument for the possible. Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation is a research practice that reconstructs, from incomplete archival traces, what official history has failed to record or has deliberately erased. Applied to Bakić’s work, this means that the exhibition does not follow only the official history of his reception but seeks out the unrealized potentials of his practice. Bakić’s sculptures are thus read as an archive of a future that has not yet arrived, but whose potential remains active.

About the Artist

Vojin Bakić (Bjelovar, 1915 – Zagreb, 1992) was one of the most important internationally recognized Croatian sculptors of the 20th century. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Frano Kršinić and specialized with Ivan Meštrović. Over the course of his career, he developed a distinctive artistic language that moved from figuration toward radically abstract surfaces that deconstruct volume and engage actively with space and light—most notably in cycles such as the Foliated Forms and Light-Bearing Forms. He is the author of a number of monumental memorials in Kamenska, Dotrščina, Valjevo, Petrova Gora, and Kragujevac. From the 1950s onward, he participated in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, and EXPO 58 in Brussels. His work—marked by postwar devastation and shifting political regimes—today represents one of the key chapters of modernist sculpture and the regional heritage of memory.

After 60 Years in His Hometown: