At the invitation of the Cultural Center of Svilajnac, the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art will host an exhibition titled "Emerik Feješ – Postcards from (Non)existent Cities." At the opening on Thursday, October 12, at 7 PM at the Cultural Center of Svilajnac (Svetog Save 58), the audience will be addressed by the center's director, Jelena Tomić, and the exhibition curator, Senka Latinović. The exhibition will be officially opened by the director of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art, Ivana Bašičević Antić, PhD. The exhibition will be open until November 3, every working day from 8 AM to 8 PM.
We are organizing this exhibition in anticipation of the 120th anniversary of Emerik Feješ's birth, which will be celebrated on November 3, 2024. For this occasion, we have selected twenty-five works by Emerik Feješ, as well as three works by authors Josefina Feješ and Dragiša Bunjevački, which have rarely been exhibited before. All works belong to the collection of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art (Belgrade/Jagodina).
The unusual and unique creative personality of Emerik Feješ unexpectedly emerged on the Yugoslav art scene at the very end of the 1940s. After an early retirement, a worker and craftsman with no prior contact with art felt an irresistible desire to create paintings.

Initially, he gauged public reactions by confidently exhibiting his works in the window of his first wife Silvija's typing office in Novi Sad, but often faced mockery and misunderstanding from those around him. Fortunately, his talent was soon recognized and encouraged by leading authorities in the art scene, such as art historians Ota Bihalji-Merin and Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, and artists Boško Petrović, Ivan Tabaković, Ana Bešlić, and many others. This is evidenced by the fact that he had his first solo exhibition in 1956 at the Gallery of Primitive Art in Zagreb.
At first, he focused thematically on nudes and genre scenes from the everyday life of workers and craftsmen, which he later completely abandoned, following the advice of artist Boško Petrović, to focus exclusively on the representation of cities. At a time when a new phenomenon of naive painters, or painters without formal artistic education, was slowly entering the visible field of our artistic public, Feješ stood out as a rare example of an artist in this genre who did not paint rural environments but urban fabric, primarily architectural structures, streets, and facades of domestic and world metropolises. A fascinating fact is that most of the cities depicted in his paintings he had never visited; he learned about their appearance through postcards and newspaper articles (often in black and white), and he imagined their sensibility and vibrancy.
He painted patiently and meticulously, building architecture partly based on the real appearance of buildings and partly constructed from freely imagined combinations of architectural plasticity, surroundings, people, animals, cars, and the sky. As a man and artist of the 20th century, already accustomed to photographic and film imagery, the ultimate goal of his paintings was not a realistic representation but rather the opposite – an unrestrained vision and joy of creating a colorful, exuberant, and optimistic world that does not exist in reality.
His technical approach to creating paintings was also specific. He would transfer selected visual templates from postcards onto blank paper in the appropriate scale, and then multiply the drawing using carbon paper. Although he made several paintings with the same motif, each one differed in altered details on the facade, color arrangement, and the position of people in the painting, so there are no two identical paintings in his oeuvre.
He would then carefully apply color to the drawing, dipping the tip of a matchstick or corn husk into tempera and filling in the outlined areas, and only in later phases did he occasionally start using paintbrushes. This rudimentary approach was not only a reflection of his modest material circumstances but also a kind of surrender to a meditative state of slow and repetitive outlining and coloring. He mostly painted at night when he had the opportunity to fully focus on his work and immerse himself in his imagination.
Although his work has often been evaluated as naive art in professional circles, today, as we reassess long-established concepts and the rigidity of their boundaries, we can step outside strict historical-artistic classifications and say that Emerik Feješ is a classic of modern art. Like Henri Rousseau or Ilija Bašić Bosić, his creative impulse overcame all unfavorable life circumstances and bravely responded to the inner call to show the world how he sees it through his eyes. Although he did not manage to visit most of the cities he painted, he left us a parallel world, an imaginary realm that encourages us to reflect on how we perceive the cities we live in or pass through on our travels. It seems that now more than ever, we need the inspirational freshness of Feješ's perspective, which still holds curiosity, a connection to the distant and unknown, and above all – joie de vivre.