Opening hours:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10:00-18:00
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10:00-18:00
SYMPOSIUM FILES
Maribor Regional Museum, Grajska ulica 2, Maribor, Slovenia
The international symposium MUSEOEUROPE 2025 is dedicated to Eduard Lind (1827–1904), a Hamburg-born artist who lived and worked in Maribor for nearly 50 years. In addition to numerous portraits of Maribor citizens, mayors, and distinguished townspeople, he also painted a series of sacred works, portraits of church dignitaries, landscapes, and cityscapes. Among them is the portrait of Prelate Augustinus Duda of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul in the Lavant Valley, painted in 1872, which will be on display at the Maribor Regional Museum during the symposium.
Guest museum: The Museum of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul in Lavanttal.
This museum houses one of the most important private collections in Austria, featuring exceptional works of applied art, prints, and paintings, as well as precious textiles and numismatic collections. A significant part of the collection is the monastery library, which contains over 180,000 valuable manuscripts and publications dating from the 5th to the 18th century. This year's thematic exhibition, titled "The Treasury of Carinthia – A Universe of Knowledge," presents rare objects from the early Middle Ages to the modern era, illustrating the rise and fall of various dynasties and the monastery's treasury, with masterpieces by renowned artists such as Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, and their contemporaries.
The international symposium is associated with the temporary exhibition MARIBOR PAINTER EDUARD LIND, on view at the Cinema Partizan exhibition space. Accompanied by a scientific monograph, the exhibition presents the life and work of the most significant portraitist in Maribor in the second half of the 19th century.
A symposium proceedings book, featuring scientific papers and abstracts from participants from five European countries, will be published in conjunction with the event.
According to records in the artist’s notebook, Lind spent 112 days working at the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul in Lavanttal. During this time, he painted the portrait of the venerable Augustinus Duda and carried out restoration work. The authenticity of Lind's authorship is confirmed by the clearly visible signature and date on the back of the canvas. Augustinus Duda (b. 1827 – d. 1897) entered the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul in 1847, took his vows on September 22, 1850, and was ordained a priest in Vienna on July 27, 1851. After completing theological studies in Klagenfurt and at the University of Vienna, he taught at the theological school in Klagenfurt from 1852. In 1866, he was elected abbot of the monastery. From 1871 until his death in 1897, he also served as the monastery librarian, systematically cataloging the extensive library, which contained nearly 30,000 volumes.
Benedictine Monastery of St Paul in the Labot Valley (Photo: dr. Gerfried Sitar)
From 2020, the furniture collection of the Maribor Regional Museum will be on display in a new permanent exhibition called Spaces of Beauty. The concept of the exhibition is based on four spaces. Each of them presents selected pieces of furniture from different periods, treated with different decorative techniques. The basic techniques of decorating wooden furniture have been in use since the time of ancient civilisations, and their development has been prompted each time by the need for a new message.
The exhibition, with the many interesting facts that the artist offers alongside the objects, expands the space of reflection beyond the furniture itself, beyond the buildings for which it was made, beyond the ambitions of the rulers, the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the church, beyond the talent of the designers and the constraints of time, to visions of our common future. It poses the question whether, today, when technology makes it possible to realize every idea, we are able to seriously reflect on what beauty is.
