The Collection: Marinko Sudac Champions the Legacy of Europe's Avant-Garde

Marinko Sudac is a Croatian art collector, editor and exhibitions producer with a razor sharp focus. Having spent decades shaping his collection into a tightly constructed intellectual project that traces avant-garde artistic practices across Central and Eastern Europe from 1909 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he is passionate about bringing artists who have remained in the margins into the spotlight. He is also the founder of several platforms that extend this mission, including the Virtual Museum of the Avant-Garde, the Institute for the Research of the Avant-Garde, and the Marinko Sudac Foundation.

Here, Sudac shares with The Art Journal the lessons he has learned from his singular pursuit of the radical and the historically sidelined, the most controversial work in his collection, and why impatience is a virtue.

How do you describe your collection?

I would describe my collection as a systematically constructed entity devoted to the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, primarily within the context of Central and Eastern Europe, yet always with the ambition to include a broader European and global context. 

I began collecting in 1989, although at first I was collecting a different kind of art, without a strategy. The turning point came around 2000, when I started collecting avant-garde art. By then, the intention was clear: to build not a collection of individual works, but a coherent project with its own logic. From the outset, I developed the collection as a concept that already contained within itself the possibility of becoming a museum. It was shaped so that art could be read through continuities, relationships, archival material, and a broader social context. What mattered was not the fact that I bought something, but the moment when I began to understand the criterion by which I was looking and choosing.

You have previously mentioned that you do not build the collection as a sequence of individual masterpieces, but as a wider network of relationships. How has your approach to mapping this network developed or changed over the years?

I first shaped a narrative within my immediate region, pointing to the continuities that link early avant-garde phenomena to the postwar neo-avant-garde and the New Art Practice. Once that model proved convincing, I began to expand it through the domino effect to Central and Eastern Europe and, today, to other regions as well. The basic approach has remained the same, but the way in which I map and present that network has gradually been refined. Alongside artworks, of equal importance are archives, documentation, correspondence and the broader social context. Rather than following a readymade canon, I try to show how it actually came into being. 

Non-Aligned Modernity. Eastern-European Art and Archives from the Marinko Sudac Collection, 2016 (installation view, FM Centro per l'arte contemporanea, Milan). © Marinko Sudac Collection. Courtesy the Marinko Sudac Collection and FM Centro per l'arte contemporanea, Milan

What is the biggest and most instructive mistake you have made as a collector?

The biggest mistake was not that I chose the wrong work, but that I did not reach certain artists earlier. Over time, I learned that in this field one must act immediately when a clear lead appears. Some things cannot be recovered afterwards: a missed encounter, an unrealised conversation, or the fact that you did not reach an artist while they were still alive. I have learned that intuition has no value unless it is followed by a concrete move.

Have shifts in the political or social climate ever impacted your decision to proceed with – or step away from – a purchase?

The political and social climate helps me understand art more deeply, but it does not determine my acquisition decisions. In temporal terms, my collection is defined by the period from 1909 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Much of the art was created in complex, unfavourable, or ideologically burdened circumstances, which is why that context forms part of its historical weight. Current political atmospheres do not affect my collecting, however. I look at only how important a particular work or artist is for the broader structure of the collection, for its narrative, and for the historical reading of a given place and time.

What responsibility do collectors have toward the artists whose work they acquire?

The moment someone enters your collection, neutrality no longer exists. In a certain way, you participate in how that work will be understood and where it will be placed within the art system. A collector can assume part of the responsibility for ensuring that deserving artists do not remain at the margins or within the wrong framework. For me, that also means actively creating a parallel art system. I establish criteria where they do not exist, broaden interest where it does not yet exist, and open space for artists whom the official system recognises too late. It is precisely in the recognition and revaluation of such artists that I see one of the important functions of the collection.

Where do you think the commercial art industry currently fails artists or collectors?

We have entered a phase of very high consumerism. Works are often bought quickly, without serious reflection, while part of the gallery system introduces and exhausts artists almost serially, according to the pace of the market rather than the true measure of their work. In such a model, the artist easily becomes a product, and the collector a buyer of hype.

Another problem lies in the loss of distinction between passing visibility and lasting value. When part of the buying public no longer has its own criteria, the market becomes vulnerable to misinformation, trends and the effects of the crowd. At that point, it is not only galleries that fail, but the entire system of evaluation, because value is too often replaced by promotion.

What is the most controversial work in your collection?

If the public were to regard one work in my collection as controversial, it would probably be Assimilation (1997–2010) by Zoran Todorović. Although the Collection formally ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that work matters to me as a clear legacy of the avant-garde. Its importance lies not in provoking for the sake of provocation, but in the way it strikes directly at the boundaries of what society considers acceptable and raises questions of beauty, the body, pain, excess, and social norms. In that sense, it belongs to the same line of radical questioning opened by the avant-garde. Much of what appears canonised to us today was, at the moment of its creation, often seen as unacceptable, incomprehensible, or challenging.

What message would you give to your younger self – the person just starting out as a collector?

In one way or another, everything I would say to my younger self today is already something I pass on to my children and the associates I work with. What matters most is this: when it comes to art and collecting, there is little room for slow decisions. The greatest mistakes in art do not happen because you acted too early, but because you waited too long. Waiting too long often means you have missed not only an artwork but also an entire relationship, context, or the opportunity to shape something important.

Čedomil Plavšić, Untitled, 1930, collage, paper, 234 x 324 mm. © Marinko Sudac Collection. Courtesy the artist and Marinko Sudac Collection

Secondly, understand as early as possible the difference between what merely attracts you and what truly defines you. Once that becomes clear, decisions are no longer a matter of hesitation, but of direction. 

If your collection were studied fifty years from now, what would you hope people would understand about the history of the avant-garde and specifically its status today?

I believe that radical practices in art will be even more important fifty years from now than they are today, precisely because the difference between that kind of art and the large quantity of contemporary production will become more stark. The avant-garde matters not only as a historical episode, but as a moment in which artists truly pushed the boundaries of language, medium and thought. It is not a style or a decorative label, but a serious transformation in the way art is conceived and produced. Over time, I believe it will become ever clearer that the avant-garde was and remains a measure of artistic necessity; in other words, the difference between a work that truly risks something and one that merely circulates within the system.