POP ART – THE INFELD COLLECTION

1. 8. – 27. 9. 2026.

​For the first time in Opatija, works by world-famous pop art artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Mel Ramos, Kiki Kogelnik and Steve Kaufman are on display. The exhibition was realised in cooperation between the Croatian Museum of Tourism and the Infeld Collection from Vienna.

​The name pop art, meaning popular art, originated in the 1950s in the United States of America and Great Britain. The horrors of World War II were followed by technological progress and the development of the consumer society. Pop art connected art and everyday life, placing the striking visual world of advertising and mass media at the centre of aesthetic consideration. The artists created imaginative interpretations of commercial products and popular cultural phenomena, ranging from humorous and bizarre to extremely socially critical. This created a unique iconography and a recognisable visual language marked by vivid colours, strong contrasts and direct visual expression.

​The works of world-class pop art artists are an extremely valuable and carefully curated part of the prestigious Infeld Collection. The exhibition presents 42 works by ten representatives of American and European pop art: Andy Warhol, Mel Ramos, James Rizzi, Richard Lindner, Steve Kaufmann, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Kiki Kogelnik and Allen Jones, which provide an insight into the various approaches and poetics of this art movement. The works were created using watercolour, screenprinting, etching, lithography, felt-tip pen, and combined techniques.

​THE SPECIFICITY OF POP ART IN THE INFELD COLLECTION

​The works of world-famous pop art artists have also found their important place in the Infeld Collection. Its creation was initiated in the mid-1960s by musical string manufacturer Peter Infeld (1942–2009) and his mother Margaretha Infeld (1904–1994).

​The exhibition also features famous portraits by Andy Warhol, the movement’s most significant representative. Among others, there are portraits of Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe, which have become symbols for many generations and are deeply rooted in the collective consciousness. Apart from the depiction of everyday objects, such as the iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans, his work was marked by a fascination with the human form, self-promotion, and the secrecy of private life. Warhol knew many stars of the entertainment world personally and portrayed them in an intimate and personal way.

​The chosen visual for the exhibition is a screenprint by American artist Steve Kaufman, based on a photo portrait of Peter Infeld. Like his former teacher Andy Warhol, Kaufman used photographs as the starting point for his work. Before creating the screenprint, he composed and adapted the photographs, and then enhanced them with paint using intense layers of colour.

​Peter Infeld also personally knew the American pop art master Mel Ramos, known for his erotic nudes. Painted in bright colours, the California Venus appears in all of this artist’s creative periods. Through his depictions of advertising products and the female body, Mel Ramos managed to overcome the coldness of the connection between women and goods and create an atmosphere of closeness, cheerfulness and warmth.

​The works of Austrian pop art artist Kiki Kogelnik are particularly relevant. She lived and worked in the USA alongside her world-famous colleagues. Her works are playful, colourful, and at the same time also politically engaged. They reveal the dual nature of pop art ‒ her characters are connected to the European artistic tradition and ideal of beauty, but are also exposed to the media’s distorting gaze.

​To make the works of art accessible to the wider public, patron Peter Infeld, the former owner and director of Thomastik-Infeld GmbH, opened representative cultural centres in Halbturn, in the Austrian federal state of Burgenland, and in the picturesque town of Dobrinj on the island of Krk. After Peter Infeld died in 2009, his widow, Croatian Zdenka Infeld, continued the family business and developed the art collection. The focus of the collection is on the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism, Croatian naïve art, pop art, Buddhist meditative paintings from Tibet (so-called thangka) and Art brut.

​“A day when I don’t buy or don’t want to buy a painting is a lost day for me. I don’t want my passion to be limited by methodology or expert advice. Sometimes I ask for the opinion of people who are well-versed in a particular field, but what I end up buying is decided solely upon my spontaneity and personal feeling.”

​— Peter Infeld

​ORGANISATION & IMPRESSUM

  • ​ORGANISED BY: Hrvatski muzej turizma / Croatian Museum of Tourism
  • ​COLLABORATION: THE INFELD COLLECTION
  • ​PUBLISHER: Hrvatski muzej turizma / Croatian Museum of Tourism
  • ​FOR THE PUBLISHER, EDITOR: Nataša Ivančević
  • ​AUTHORS OF THE CONCEPT, EXHIBITION CURATORS: Yordanka Weiss PhD, and Nataša Ivančević PhD
  • ​TEXTS: Yordanka Weiss
  • ​VISUAL SET – UP: Lada Sega, Petra Klanjac, Majkić
  • ​LANGUAGE EDITING AND PROOFREADING: Dijana Stanić-Rešicki
  • ​TRANSLATION: Martin Mayhew, Irina Riđić
  • ​GRAPHIC DESIGN AND LAYOUT: Wanda design
  • ​MEDIA PROMOTION: Ivan Modrić, Ahelon

Short biographies of the exhibition’s curators

Nataša Ivančević PhD

She was born in 1968 in Rijeka. She graduated in Art History and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where she received her doctorate in 2023 at the Department of Art History. She has been working in the museum profession since 1995, and has authored and realised more than sixty exhibitions of modern and contemporary artists. She worked at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (1995-2010) as a curator and senior curator and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (2010-2025) as a museum advisor in charge of managing the Collections Department, assistant to the director and head of the Sculpture Collection. Since 1st April 2025, she has been the director of the Croatian Museum of Tourism in Opatija. She actively participates in scholarly and professional conferences at home and abroad, publishes academic and specialist texts, and is a member of the committee for organising academic conferences. For the retrospective exhibitions of Vojin Bakić, Ivana Popović and Ratko Petrić, she received professional awards for the best annual exhibitions in Croatia.

Yordanka Weiss PhD

She was born in 1973 in Bulgaria. She graduated in Slavic languages at the University of St Kliment Ohridski in Sofia (1992-1997), and at the University of Vienna (2005-2010) she graduated with a degree in public communications and a doctorate in linguistics.

Since 1991, she has been active in the field of art and culture. From 1991 to 1992, she worked as a journalist at the Balkan News Agency in Sofia. From 1992 to 2004, she was the editor and head of the cultural department of the newspaper Standard News in Sofia, and from 2004 to 2012, she was a correspondent from Vienna for the newspaper Trud. Since 2014, she has been the curator of the Infeld Collection in Vienna.

As curator of one of the largest private art collections in Austria, she is responsible for the exhibition programmes at the Infeld Cultural Centre in Halbturn (Austria) and at the Infeld Cultural Centre in Dobrinj on the island of Krk (Croatia). She also coordinates numerous collaborations with museums in Austria and throughout Europe, where works from the Infeld Collection are presented as loans at exhibitions.

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The exhibition was financed by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the Town of Opatija.

​OPENING HOURS:

​Daily: 10 am – 9 pm