In 1988 Ljerka Njerš began to work together with the Zagreb City Museum, deepening her very marked interest in the cultural and historical past of Croatia. Zagreb topics of the 18th and 19th century enforced a series of associations that took on a new value in the creative energy of Ljerka Njerš. Her deliberate investigations led her to cooperate with the Museum. Ljerka’s curiosity and her research into the Museum’s stocks were continued through a much closer and indeed marketing-oriented collaboration with the artist. The Museum helped Ljerka, who had no space for her work, and temporarily assigned her a room in the building at 9 St Mark’s Square (Radić Square as it then was), for her to set up a studio in. This dilapidated old mansion, that the City had acquired for the Museum, had just been taken over by our conservation experts. Research work began – a probe showed interesting murals of the end of the 18th century, fragments of a Baroque portal were found. The mansion suddenly came to life, and living together with the conservators gave Ljerka new stimulus in her current working area. From this room there was a view into a quiet courtyard enhanced by the sounds of stringed instruments – of the Zagreb Soloists, who had even earlier been housed in the courtyard building, in which the first Zagreb radio station had been set up in 1926.
It was in the quiet of this Upper Town mansion that the systematic collaboration between Ljerka Njerš and the Museum began. First of all, in the Museum, Ljerka discovered all the quality and fascination of the wooden moulds used by the Zagreb gingerbread makers of the 17th and 18th century – used their bas reliefs with their many carved and minute details. In her ceramic interpretation, they took on a new value, a materialised memorial of the spirit and times in which they were created, as Marina Baričević wrote (among other things) about these clay items in connection with the Prize of the 24th Zagreb Salon (1989), in which, in the Proposal Section, Ljerka Njerš and the Zagreb City Museum were given a prize for souvenirs. This revivified museum item, now in coloured and glazed porcelain, creatively worked by Ljerka Njerš, became a unique souvenir of the Museum and of Zagreb.
Nada Premerl
