The Gallery of the New University – Faculty of Slovenian and International Studies

With the opening of the Gallery of the New University, we begin to implement a specific programme that systematically supports art as an important social activity. What art contributes to society is in many ways incomparable to anything else that people do, produce, create, think, accept, and feel. Art is the most important social surplus we need to nurture.

The gallery has a beautiful space that gives artists good exhibition options with its size and walls that allow the paintings to breathe. In the gallery, we intend to present established artists, not necessarily painters, but also sculptors or conceptualists, whose exhibitions will be curated and accompanied by a professional word, especially by members of the gallery’s expert committee.

Paintings take a long time to create. Although this claim is very relative. However, we must in any case recognize that works of art are created long before they begin to be painted. And they can also be painted in several stages, sometimes even several years. Sometimes someone asks me how long I paint one picture. I can best answer by analogy. If you don’t play the piano, how much time do you need to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata properly? And how much time does a piano virtuoso need? Art is always created in dialogue with works of art that are already among us, and with regard to all knowledge of art theory, spatial keys, colour theory, aesthetic theories. A work of art is art because it places itself in the world of art. The world of art is in a constant process of creation, transformation, enrichment, revision, etc.

Let’s support art.  

prof. dr. Polona Tratnik

Polona Tratnik expresses her passion for creativity through various media; as an extremely sensitive and sensitive artist, she touches on many fields, in parallel with art projects in the field of biotechnology (37° C, Hair, Microcosm, Unique, Hair in Vitro, Initiation), she paints and writes novels, short prose, poetry, lyrics, and dramatic texts. She takes photographs and has been interested in music since the early childhood. She is involved in art and its engaged role in modern times. She is interested in the issues of art’s intervention in other social spheres, interrogates and analyses various fields of communication, the relationship between the artist and the work of art, the role of the viewer as a subject and their spatial presence.

All of us who were surprised by Polona Tratnik’s latest paintings, as we know her primarily as a scientist in the field of art philosophy and a biotechnological artist, should remember the thought of art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich who said that surprise and wonder are the result of the biological function of art, which keeps us curious and addresses our ability to accept the new and unusual.

A turn in Polona Tratnik’s creativity is not a typical post-modern turn. Painter and researcher Leonardo da Vinci, encyclopaedists of the Enlightenment, actors of the Art Nouveau movement under the influence of the development of microscopy and microbiological research, which can be visualized on the mantle of Klimt’s portrait of Adela Bloch-Bauer (1907) – artists throughout history have often been fascinated by modern scientific discoveries or they were educated scientists themselves, such as biologists and geologists. Research in biotechnology and neuroscience has also triggered a strong wave in contemporary art, which is looking for its raison d’être.

Recently, Polona Tratnik has been invited by the painting to listen to it and re-establish a dialogue with it. In this turn, we might have found ourselves in a similar position as spectators at the end of the nineteenth century in front of the Édouard Manet’s cult painting, Breakfast on the Grass (1862–63). The painting was shocking because of the illumination of social and sexual roles in the then bourgeois environment, represented by both male figures in perfect bourgeois attire, discussing very boring things apparently. Among them sits a naked woman, not a goddess, not Olympia, who spontaneously stares into the viewer face to face, like the naked truth. Something within the established and routine habits of the time had obviously changed so much that a kind of visual mutation of the painting was needed to accommodate the further development of modern painting.

However, Polona Tratnik is not interested in the aestheticization of microbiological forms, cells, viruses and bacteria, which in their forms and structure offer themselves for further artistic creation. Her view in front of the image avoids the inclusion of optical aids and techniques, such as the use of a microscope, perspective, and other models of visual thinking. She gently touches the painting, waiting for it to speak to her and responds to it. Unlike the processes of control and management, Polona Tratnik’s painting means opening, mindfulness. For her, painting is a creative medium that enables a way out of the apparatus society and genuine contact with the pulse of life.

Polona Tratnik’s extremely energetic paintings, created in the last two years, are on display to the public for the first time. They are passed on. They are open to reflection and wonder.

Vesna Krmelj and Tjaša Šavorič

About the author

Prof. Polona Tratnik is the dean of the Faculty of Slovene and International Studies at the New University and a research counsellor at the Institute IRRIS for Research, Development and Strategies of Society, Culture and Environment. She has an academic degree in painting, a master’s degree in sculpture and a doctorate in philosophy. She was a Fulbright researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz and a visiting professor at the same university, as well as at Capital Normal University in Beijing, Taik University (now Aalto) in Helsinki, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She is the president of the Slovenian Society for Aesthetics and a member of the executive board of the International Association for Aesthetics. She is the author of seven monographs published in four languages, including Conquest of Body, Biopower with Biotechnology (Springer 2017) and Hacer-vivir más allá del cuerpo y del medio (Herder 2013). In the world of art, she is established primarily as a pioneer of biotechnological art. She has exhibited paintings and hybrid art projects at prominent events in Australia.

The painter carries with her prints of everything she has seen and felt so far, even when traveling the white world, and draws matrices of memories, especially the experience of New York, where she created her much more intimate white paintings that look without subframes with embossed round patterned accents concentrated in the expanse of aerial compositions, like edged napkins. In the present paintings, however, she conceived the original idea more monumentally into a richer, but equally ascetic cycle, conceived as a collection of ignorant pages or as a white enigma of secret writing, which the author eagerly eavesdrops on and with which it has no idea of ​​translucent sign architecture, which only needs to be filled with concrete meanings, just as unfinished mysterious letters are imprinted on the floor plan of its relief foundations.

Looking at such signs, the painter subtly tunes the white matter applied on a white background to sound in the white silence of the canvas itself, harmonized in a constructional order filled with a disjointed rhythm of only patterns of form. With such moves, Breda Sturm joins the renewed tradition of modernist, with communication signs filled with historical records. He fills the carrier white in his paintings with his own white while writing characters, and when he turns a new sheet with each picture – painted together for two printing sheets – they all together form an optically orchestrated whole. In her silence, however, she waits for the sounds of messages, which the painter draws in relief on her white canvases with elusive signals like air plaster.

prof. dr. Milček Komelj

About the author

Breda Sturm in 2010 with prof. Tuga Šušnik and prof. Tomaž Brejc graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana. In 2003 she graduated from prof. Vojteh Ravnikar at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana. She is self-employed in culture and works in the fields of painting, illustration, equipment and book design. She continued her studies in Italy, Spain and at The Art Students League of New York in the USA.

In 2007 she received a scholarship from the Society of Slovenian Artists for young promising authors in the field of illustration. Her works have been presented at exhibitions, among others:

The Magic of Art: Protagonists of Slovenian Contemporary Art 1968-2013 (Villa Manin, Italy / Künstlerhaus, Austria / Glyptothek HAZU, Croatia) 2014-2015.

Slovenian Contemporary Art SLOVENINDIA, New Delhi, India, Jaipur House, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2016

Painting performance with the group Arrhythmia Soundscapes and Taal Traces, India Habitat Center, New Delhi, India and at the National Gallery of Modern Art Mumbai, India, 2018.

Solo exhibition of graphics Turn New Leaf, created at the art residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris in September 2018, Open Studio Cité des Arts, Paris 2018, European Parliament, Brussels, 2018.

Since 2010 she has been a member of the Association of Fine Artists Ljubljana. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

More information at: http://www.bredasturm.com/.

The middle generation painter Mitja Ficko (1973) designs his paintings based on his own feelings and experiences, and most often he leaves the paintings to happen. His practice is characterized by intense play with space and perspective, and most of the paintings are built in one way or another on the principle of layering, re-overlapping and concealing. In the realization of this visual language and the construction of content, he helps himself by using variously rough glitters and a very specific, unique use of geometry, colors and textures. His atmospheric, subtle mystique-filled images are nowadays quickly recognizable by their varied, daring compositions, indefinable, fantasy content, and constant transition from the narrative to the abstract. The depicted scenes represent various excerpts of personal metaphors and experiences of feeling. The paintings, saturated with mysterious creatures and an ambivalent atmosphere, invite you into a world that encourages and encourages each viewer to observe the work and to interpret independently. At the exhibition in the Gallery of the New University on Ljubljana’s Mestni trg, works of smaller formats are exhibited, in which figurals and virtual narratives are much more expressive, in some places even emphasized. Unlike the recently exhibited, somewhat more abstract and glittering works in the Celje Gallery of Contemporary Art or the SLOART Gallery in Ljubljana, this fresh production is a bit more playful, pavlihasta and distinctly zoomorphic. The majority of the works were created in the last year, and slightly older works are also on display, such as the playful spotted horses Red Carpet (2020) and the hanging colorful ribbons Strange place (2019). Most of the works are dominated by thoughtful collage of volumes and constant overlap and combination of depicted subjects such as tropical birds, pennants, bloodthirsty tigers and domestic foxes. They are accompanied by the author’s favorite wrapped clouds, stylized trees and peripheral rainbows. The latest works are full of charming surprises and hidden details. The authors are interested in the artistic interweaving and creation of images that appear as a kind of illusion in an undefined space. Definable images of orange foxes, tall trees and milky pets move in a lack of space in a way that slightly irritates the viewer’s eye. The saturation of colors and shapes and the used collage strategy enable a wide range of delving into individual works that function in the sense of painting, but in linear space and time act as a perspective trick or illusion. Some of the works are based on animal puzzles for children. Exploring and composing wooden cubes depicting portraits of forest animals led the author to further play with composition and discover interesting combinations. He was also inspired by the format and versatility of a variety of children’s magnets and stickers, which are shown in the pictures in the form of humorous combinations, now animals, secondly weather phenomena, wave stars and even the interior. Even though the entrances to individual works are distinctly figurative, the author’s desire is to move away from the narrative and provide the viewer with an independent experience of understanding and feeling the image. Animals by themselves do not have a serious allegorical meaning or narrative arc. Sometimes they simply happen and occupy the most appropriate, artistically suitable place in individual paintings. Later, they may repeat themselves and play the role of a random protagonist in new mystical worlds and sensual occasions. Although some completely abstract paintings are presented, which are primarily built with geometry and color, the exhibition is united by the author’s recognizable figurals. The extremely fruitful period is reflected in a number of smaller experimental series, of which the most representative and interesting examples are presented at the exhibition. Mitja Ficko shows us his developing art world at the exhibition Lying Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It arises intensely, constantly strengthens, and encourages the viewer to take a bolder and unencumbered approach, reading and feeling.

Maša Žekš

About the author

Mitja Ficko (1973, Murska Sobota) graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1999 with professors Janez Bernik and Gustav Gnamuš. In 2002 he received his master’s degree under the mentorship of Metka Krašovec. During his career he has had solo exhibitions at the Equrna Gallery in Ljubljana, Kibla Maribor, Piran Coastal Galleries, Srečišče Gallery in Ljubljana, UGM Studio of the Maribor Art Gallery, Alkatraz Gallery in Ljubljana, Kvartirna hiša in Celje, Kusthalle Ravensburg, Galerie Sechzig in Feldkirch house in Ribnica, in the Städtische Galerie Villingen-Schwenningen, the Celje Gallery of Contemporary Art and the SLOART Gallery in Ljubljana. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Presences, KIBLA Portal, Maribor (2018), The Unheard of World I Have in My Head (Metamodernism and Metaromanticism in Slovene Painting, KGLU Slovenj Gradec (2019), Time Without Innocence. Newer Painting in Slovenia , Moderna galerija Ljubljana (2019), Apokalipsa 2020, Galerija Equrna, Ljubljana (2020), The Curious Minds in Die ich rief, die Geister, werd ich nun nicht los, LIA Leipzig International Art Program, Spinnerei, Leipzig (2020). and works between Ljubljana and Leipzig.

Before us are the cultural posters of the art collective New collectivism, created on various occasions, mostly during the golden times of cultural posters in Slovenia, i.e. from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Most of the exhibited posters are theater posters, which represents a particularly strong group of cultural posters, and in addition to these, there are film and music posters as well as posters in honor of the artists Srečko Kosovel and Toulouse-Lautrec. All exhibited posters are linked to a specific cultural event, which they address in a unique way. If the client expects from an advertising poster, whether market or political, a central message conveyed as unambiguously as possible, inviting purchase or political support, the form of a cultural poster allows for a high degree of creative autonomy. A cultural poster is linked to a cultural event, but compared to an advertising poster, it can be much more open in its message. The quality of a cultural poster can actually be measured in the opposite effect to that of an advertising poster, i.e. in the fact that it does not close, narrow and limit, but rather opens up meaningful dimensions, so that it can even add them to the original event to which it invites. The New collectivism achieves an extraordinary creative breakthrough precisely in this, which sometimes surprised the client to such an extent that he even forbade the postering of an already printed poster, such as the poster for Caryl Churchill’s play Girl and a Half. The artistic director of SNG Drama did not understand the inclusion of the politician Winston Churchill, who is otherwise not the subject of the drama itself, on the poster, which contributed to the artistic excess of the poster compared to the drama.

New collectivism emerged in the 1980s as a division of the larger art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, responsible for design. The famous American art theorist Arthur C. Danto called this time the time “after the end of history”, when every artist can do what he wants, and no style or artistic direction is more mandatory or more important than others. Therefore, since then, artists have been nomadically wandering through history and through various cultural environments, from high art to popular market culture, from folk to political culture, and they combine, recombine or reposition found elements in various ways. The technique of eclecticism is essential to New Collectivism. At the same time, in the 1980s, they, as a section of Neue Slowenische Kunst, were characterized by inspiration in the rhetoric of political propaganda, preferably that which is particularly effective in a given space. In doing so, they evoke collective memory, but they do not build it, but rather destroy it. Art here is not in the service of politics. The markers that are used usually do not lead to the markers they were associated with in the systems from which they were taken. Instead, the decontextualized elements enter into new, unexpected connections and form entirely new compositions of meanings or nonsense. When the logic of the original meaning breaks down and the original signifier withdraws, another meaning may be offered in its place, which may not have been associated with the given signifier in any known system, which may come from a completely different context, and which may not bring semantic sense. For it is not necessary that all meanings are always determinable and definitive. On the contrary, the New Collectivism posters are designed to be semantically slippery.

But it is most likely not a mere randomness of the selection of elements, but rather a deliberate branching, in which the apology of art is intertwined with allusions to various socio-political ideas or prohibitions. In this world of art, historical figures, pop art, sots art, ancient mythologies, avant-garde and classical art, socialist art, political ideologies, food, erotica and pornography meet – all at once. Although this is really about life in all its diachronic and synchronic complexity – or because of it – some of the hints about society that are offered for viewing are sometimes acceptable and sometimes unbearable.

Dr. Polona Tratnik

About the author

The author of the exhibition is New Collectivism, which was founded in 1984 as the graphic design department of the Neue Slowenische Kunst movement. Its members are Darko Pokorn, Roman Uranjek (IRWIN), Miran Mohar and Dejan Knez. The New collectivism uses the retroprinciple method, which means electrical interference with relevant motives and their reintropeation.

New collectivism emerged in the 1980s as a division of the larger art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, responsible for design. The famous American art theorist Arthur C. Danto called this time the time “after the end of history”, when every artist can do what he wants, and no style or artistic direction is more mandatory or more important than others. Therefore, since then, artists have been nomadically wandering through history and through various cultural environments, from high art to popular market culture, from folk to political culture, and they combine, recombine or reposition found elements in various ways.

In the Photon Gallery – the Center for Contemporary Photography, since the beginning of its operation in 2003, we have paid personal attention to cooperation with artists working in the field of contemporary photography and connecting with partners from the region of Central and Southeastern Europe. We regularly exhibit the works of well-known as well as young yet unestablished photographers; accordingly, during the Design Month, we exhibited limited edition prints by young contemporary photographers from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which we believe show the future and spirit of modern photography.

As part of this exhibition, we decided to highlight the works of artists represented by Galerija Photon, including Aniko Robitz, Eva Petrič and Dino Kužnik, as well as the works of artists who worked with us in the Photonic School I and II educational program, or were exhibited as part of the Going East exhibition.

Pinter’s photographs of Ljubljana, which were created in the last 50 years, more precisely from 1970 onwards, are the result of the author’s way of observing and depicting reality with the help of a photographic camera. However, this is not a chronicle of the growth and transformation of the city, just as it is not a catalog of the most realistic depiction of buildings, their spatial coherence or picturesqueness, but rather the author’s completely personal interpretations of the city, its ambiences and images, just as these can be drawings or paintings by painters . With an artistically sensitive eye and a special sensitivity to geometric composition, spatial depth, scale, proportions and materiality, he is able to use his camera to connect and assemble parts of buildings and their details into new, unexpected wholes that tell as yet unknown stories about the city, houses and spaces. And especially about the magical dialogue of light and shadow. Photography is essentially a record of light. It seems as if Josif Brodski had Pinter’s images of Ljubljana in front of his eyes when he wrote that at sunset “the reliefs become looser, the columns more rounded, the capitals more undulating, the crowning walls bolder, the pointed tops of the bell towers stronger, the niches deeper, the apostles more draped, the angels they fly”. (Aleš Vodopivec)

About the author

Tihomir Pinter was born on January 19, 1938 in Bjelovar, Croatia, where he completed primary and secondary school. His older brother inspired him for photography as a child. Between 1954 and 1958, he attended a military medical school in Ljubljana, and in 1958 he moved to Sarajevo, where he got a job as a military technician. In 1960, he enrolled at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry in Zagreb, where he graduated (1965), master’s (1973) and doctorate (1975). In parallel with his studies, he devoted a lot of time to photography. He was an active member of photography societies and clubs, exhibited independently and at group exhibitions. To date, Pinter’s photographs have been exhibited at 94 solo and more than 600 group exhibitions at home and abroad. For his creative work in the field of photography, he received many awards and recognitions, including the Janez Puhar Lifetime Achievement Award (2006). The National Association of Photographers awarded him the title of “Master of Art Photography”, and the International Photographic Organization awarded him the title of “Excellence FIAP”.

Jože Kumer presents a series of painting works entitled Tense Bow in the Gallery of the New University in Ljubljana. Kumer’s motif is also this time based on a myth, a reflection, even a tribute to the female anthropomorphic image as the primary starting point of all creation. It originates from the traditional depiction of the character of a woman, the bearer of the elemental essence, but with a reflection on today’s socio-critical topics and controversies. From this title, mother nature, earth, water, existence, but also war, transience and ephemerality become involved in the works. His works thus include reflection on our today and tomorrow.

The author has remained faithful to his own color dynamics and object form for more than forty years. As Marijan Tršar wrote about him already in the 1990s, Kumer’s emancipation of color stems from solid realistic foundations. The merging of the abstract figural of colored surfaces is based on an understanding of the materiality of matter, which can be perceived in him both in sculptural and present works of art, which results in a plastic treatment of the object’s shape transferred to the image field.

The design of the exhibition is bipolar. While on the one hand we are accompanied by the blue phase of the author, the blue of young memory in the figural, the symbolism of water and Krka, which provided the author with the background of his childhood, the other part leans towards a more solid base of warm earthy colors. The color blue represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration and sensitivity. Therefore, it is not surprising that we are accompanied in blue by works with the motif of the Dangerous Kiss, Sail in the city and Resistance for clean water. Brown tones as stability and reliability are mixed with red energy and green harmony. These earthy tones pass into pure abstraction, and the series finally ends with an image of the author’s original city – Novo mesto.

About the author

Jože Kumer was born in 1953 in Novo mesto, where he later attended primary and secondary school, and graduated in painting from prof. Andrej Jemec and Prof. Milan Butina at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Ljubljana in 1981. He worked for six years as an art pedagogue at the Center of Secondary Technical Schools in Novo mesto, but then decided to become an independent cultural worker in the field of painting, sculpture and illustration. Today he lives and creates in Dolenjske Toplice, where he also led and organized sculpture colonies for many years.

doc. dr. Ines Vodopivec