Yesterday it was 1st May and that means a public holiday in Serbia so we decided to finally go to Kovačica, a village approximately 47 km north-east of Belgrade in the autonomous province of Vojvodina. We heard nice stories about the village, which is called “the centre of naïve art”, so we took the chance to finally visit it.
Naïve art is any form of visual art that is created by a person who lacks the formal education and training that a professional artist undergoes. The result is nevertheless beautiful and very touching.I really like it, the scenes in these paintings are mostly innocent and very down to earth: scenes of daily (village) life and done in a very colourful and lively way. The most famous painter of them all was Zuzana Chalupová, a Serbian naïve painter Slovak origin (Wiki).
Kovačica is a multi-ethnic village with 6469 inhabitants and exists of: 41% Slovaks, 34% Serbian, 10% Hungarian, 7% Romanian, 8% Others*. The naïve art is mainly done by the Slovaks as they told us.
It is a very nice village and a very nice gallery, well worth visiting it. They have other things (galleries, churches etc.) which can be visited too, but they were closed, because of the public holiday. There is, definitely, a reason to go back!
More info:
Gallery of naïve art: http://www.naivnaumetnost.com/
Municipality Kovačica: http://kovacica.org/
