Avgust Černigoj

Who was Avgust Černigoj?

Avgust Černigoj, also known in Italian as Augusto Cernigoi was a Slovenian / Yugoslavian painter, known for his avant-garde experiments in Constructivism.

He was born in Trieste, to a Slovenian family, in what was then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He finished Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Trieste, continuing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Later on, he attended the Bauhaus school of crafts and fine arts in Weimar, which had a profound impact on his development as an artist, having come into contact with Abstraction, the Russian avant-garde and particularly Constructivism through the works and teachings of Wassily Kandinsky, who brought it from Russia.

He returned to Yugoslavia, where he became friends with the avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel. In 1924, he helped with the mounting of the first Constructivist exhibition in Yugoslavia, held in the premises of the Secondary Technical School in Ljubljana. The exhibits included architectural models, reliefs and sculptures, as well as parts of machines, overalls and politically artistic slogans. This exhibition has now been partially re-constructed as part of the new displays at the re-built Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana.