Jubilee exhibition of Nikola Martinoski in Daut Pasha Hammam

This exhibition marks the 110th anniversary of the birth and the 40th anniversary of the death of academician Nikola Martinoski, an author who is of particular importance, with his complex and ample artwork, to the foundation and development of contemporary Macedonian art.
He was born on 18.08.1903 in Krushevo. He studied and graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, 1920-1927. During the period of 1927-1928 he visited the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Ransan in Paris. He had his first individual presentation in Skopje in 1929. He is one of the founders and the first principal of the Fine Arts High School, and since 1948 the director of the Art gallery, known today as The National Gallery of Macedonia. In 1967 he was elected a member of MANU (the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts). He has received a number of prestigious awards and acknowledgements. He died on 07.02.1973, in Skopje.
With the help of his knowledge and imagination, Martinoski created thousands of paintings, drawings, murals, illustrations and the theater scenographies. A great portion of his work had been damaged or destroyed. Most of them suffered from natural disasters or catastrophes (the great flood in 1962 and the catastrophic Skopje earthquake in 1963); the Second World War, when many collectors and friends of Martinoski’s had to leave Skopje. Speaking of collectors, the largest public collection of painter Martinoski can be found in Nikola Martinoski’s Gallery in his home town Krushevo. His works can also be found in a number of cities throughout Macedonia, the former yugoslavic republics and aboard.
Much has been written on his artistic opus, but by far the most study has been done by Prof. Dr. Boris Petkovski, art historian and former professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and History in Skopje.
His artworks had been linked to some of the great modern European artists, but at the same time with the Macedonian ethnic, i.e., social environment and the rich art tradition of his homeland. But, most important of all is that Martinoski had created art with his own specific creative identity, and these features of his art had introduced MODERN art in the historic development of our country. Employing his specific expressionistic, symbolic, and post-cubistic work and his refined sensuality, woven with lyrical and social realism, he painted: the little man, mothers with children, nudes and numerous portraits.
Nikola Martinoski has left an immense contribution that will surely be a great inspiration to present and future young fine artists.
Halide Paloshi, Director