The Pilon Gallery organised ten summer art workshops between 1988 and 1999, which were located in the pleasant, unique environment of the former smallest town in Slovenia, Vipavski Križ.

The idea of the workshop was, characteristic for those times of the opening of cultural boundaries in Europe, formed as meetings of local and foreign artists, the selection was made as a rule from artists active within the countries of the Alps-Adriatic Community.

Each of a total of ten meetings was led by a curator-selector who did not only choose the artists but also designed the exhibition; from which nine of the selectors were Slovenians and one of the workshops was led by an art critic from Trieste.

The photographer always present among the collaborators who attended had a dual role since he/she contributed art photography as well as documentary shots. Each artist left one work to the gallery after the workshop

was concluded. In this way, altogether more than a hundred works of various techniques and types, contributed by 82 artists, have amassed over the ten workshops.

Forming the bulk of the artists, besides Slovenians who were in the majority, there were Italian artists (mainly from the provinces of Friuli-Julian March and Veneto) and Austrians (mainly from Carinthia, Styria and upper Austria).

We can find names amongst the native and guest artists which belong to the very summit of the artistic creativity of this common area.

It is important to note that the artists belong to different generations and they permit a review of artistic creativity in this area across time.

There are a great deal of artists who live and create next to the border and thus are in close contact with the neighbouring culture.

Amongst the artists who took part in this project are several of those who had by themselves – in life or in art – crossed provincial and national borders within the space of Alps-Adriatic: some of them have studied at famous schools abroad, others moved to another country after they finished their studies, some of them went as children to other places where they grew up.

An eminent example of the linking of artists is to mention the role which the late professor Carmelo Zotti from the Venice Academy played; he drew lots of young students from Italy, Slovenia and Croatia who afterwards continued with further studies there.

Artists who belong to the Slovenian minority in neighbouring countries were also amongst the participants of the workshop and who, with their activity between the resident country and ancestral culture literally wove personal and professional links within the whole area.

The exhibitors belong artistically as well as aesthetically to various tendencies from high Modernism to echoes of the spirit of Pop Art, new landscape painting and spacial compositions.

Some of them were conquered by the charm of the area of Vipavski Križ and reflected its characteristics, others continued with an outlined path, yet all of them experienced the benevolence of the Vipava Valley atmosphere (now and then with a whiff of 'burja'!).

There are a few sculptural compositions next to the prevalence of painting as well as a good deal of photographic souvenirs of experienced moments of meeting and creativity.

The Vipavski Križ Collection has been, with the exhibition of the 30th. Anniversary of the Community (1.-30.12. 2008) re-named through its expansion into Alps Adriatic Pannonia, enriched by the work of an artist

from Hungary which joined the Community (along with Croatia) only after the most recent art workshop in Vipavski Križ.

The whole which the Community covers is symbolically completed with this, and at the same time, a door is opening anew to initiatives for linking the creators of art in our common cultural space in the future, and with it complementing the Collection which only this year has given the proof that it is not finished by any means.