OSTEN ART FESTIVAL

On the occasion of 75 years since the existence of OSTEN Skopje (founded in 1945), in 2020 OSTEN, in addition to the internationally well-known WORLD GALLERY of CARTOONS, OSTEN BIENNIAL and OSTEN BIENNIAL of award-winning authors, became the organizer of its latest activity - OSTEN ART FESTIVAL Skopje.

OSTEN ART FESTIVAL is a platform for emerging artists and young artists who invest in the development of their careers through involvement in artistic projects for collaboration, exchange of knowledge and experiences, networking and promotion of their own values. We offer this extraordinary opportunity to all artists in the world regardless of their age, gender, geographic origin, or technique/medium in which they work.

The basis of the OSTEN ART FESTIVAL is the organization of an exhibition in the OSTEN Gallery and/or a residency program for artists, where the artists themselves choose whether to participate as an individual artist or as a group. Regardless of how they are involved, the artists get a unique opportunity (in coordination with the curator of OSTEN) to exhibit together with the artworks of world-renowned artists - holders of the main awards of the OSTEN BIENNIAL: GRAND PRIX for lifetime achievement, WORLD CULTURAL HERITAGE AWARD, FIRST PRIZE...

The connection of the OSTEN ART FESTIVAL with the OSTEN BIENNIAL is natural, and the artists have multiple benefits from this connection. The basis is that every participant of the OSTEN ART FESTIVAL is automatically a participant of the OSTEN BIENNIAL (without participation fee), which multiplies the opportunities for collaboration, prizes and promotion.

We monitor the development of each artist we collaborate with and in order to contribute to motivation at the given moment of her/his professional development, the OSTEN Council established:

AWARD for ARTISTIC EXCELLENCE for the participants of the OSTEN ART FESTIVAL who stood out the most with that quality in the current year of organizing the Festival.

NOVA BAG (New Balkan Artistic Generation) for young artists (up to 35 years old) from the Balkans, who, with their artistic potential and activities at the beginning of their career, foreshadow their future artistic excellence precisely at the OSTEN ART FESTIVAL. With its geographic focus on the Balkans, OSTEN aims to stimulate cooperation between young artists from the region.