About the museum:
The gallery was founded in 1970 when Antun Augustunčić (1900-1979), who studied in Paris and Zagreb, one of the most important sculptors in Croatian modern art, donated to his native Klanjec his own sculptural oeuvre created during the 50 years of his career in art, from the 1920s to the 1970s, which brought him fame at home and abroad. The building of the gallery, designed by the architect A. Lozica, was opened to the public in 1796, with a selection of representative works that the artist had made himself. In the same year the gallery was established as a museum. Today the display is based on the permanent display of 1990, which was created after two revisions of the first display, that of Augustinčić, and embodies the wish that the approach to the work should be based on a comparison of the subjects. It covers two interdependent units: the interior display, divided in subject into smaller scale intimate sculptures, portraits and public monuments, and the sculpture park around the gallery. Thus Antun Augustinčić, known to the general public for his monumental public monuments such as the Peace in front of the UN building in New York and the Monument to the Peasant Revolt and Matija Gubec in Gornja Stubica can be seen as a highly proficient master of the intimate, particularly of nudes and torsos of women and children and powerful, psychologically cogent and sculpturally expressive portraits. Guided tours for school children and adults can be laid on for visitors to the permanent display. As well as its museum activity, the gallery is also active in publishing and exhibiting: since 1981 it has published the journal “Anali Galerije Antuna Augustinčića”, and since 1983 occasional exhibitions have regularly been held in the Salon of the Gallery, dealing since 1993 mainly with sculpture, underlining the special characteristics of the gallery as sculpture museum.
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