Tuesday, 18th June 2013, Velenje
Ciril Cesar's oeuvre at the Velenje Gallery
Retrospective exhibition 'Ciril Cesar 90 years'
A retrospective commemorating the ninetieth birthday of the sculptor and designer Ciril Cesar opened on June 15, 2013 at the Velenje Gallery. Ciril Cesar's early work disturbed the Slovenian post-war art with a strong anti-war statement. In industrial design, he took a notable step forward by introducing a systemic pattern ma-de-co (marketing–design–construction) which he implemented in 1970 when he joined Gorenje. He was in charge of the Design Center Gorenje until 1980. His heritage at Gorenje includes the idea of upgrading the design center into a design institute; this idea, however, has not come to fruition. His work left a wide-reaching imprint in Slovenian industrial design and sculpting.
Ciril Cesar - founder of the first Design Center Gorenje
For Ciril Cesar, joining Gorenje in1970 was a challenge. At the end of the sixties, Gorenje had completed the construction of all three production programs in Velenje, and introduced in-house manufacturing and discontinued production of licensed products; this, in turn, required in-house development. As Cesar joined Gorenje, he therefore cleaned up the current production and made it compatible with the European modular system which was applied for all new products thereafter. This also led to technological rationalization and decrease of production costs.
Ciril Cesar commented his work at Gorenje: "It is well known in the global industry today that successful development of products and production processes results rests on co-dependence of key sectors and cooperation of different teams. Fifty years ago, thinking about combining different departments was seen as a novelty and therefore, coordination and finding common ground was often difficult in practice. My intent and the goal of the Gorenje Design Center was to make the designed lines uniform and modular and to bring different styles into line, in order to make the production process faster and cheaper. The costs could be cut by considering the production tools as early in the design stage. We had to know when thinking creatively about the function of the form, what tools are necessary to produce such form as a part of a whole, or to produce the whole itself."
The exhibition at the Velenje Gallery will be open until September 14, 2013. As of September 18, the heritage of industrial design will be displayed ad the Gorenje showroom at the lobby of the Gorenje head office building.