Natalija Juhart Brglez is a graphic artist – by profession and by mentality! While her medium of expression is drawing, she moves within the sphere of the negative and the positive, as well as the paths that connect them: with engraving, line, and point. She gained recognition with the graphic series, done in etching and screen printing, in which she focuses on various cities by distorting and collaging perspective. After Paris and Venice, she explored her native Maribor, as well as Ljubljana. The corners created by the artist among the prominent urban landmarks, including Plečnik's Triple Bridge or Ravnikar's tower blocks, reveal that the city is not a homogeneous, rationally legible whole, but rather an interlacement of memory and gaze – a fragmented and dynamic space.

Our selection features a work begun in 2018, and one that merits being developed further today. The multi-perspective views in the 5 Homes series begin with an intimate story of the artist’s five homes: her mother's, father's, grandmother's, boyfriend's, and the flat she rents. The series conveys the fragility and fragmentariness of living (the artist kept her belongings in her car and moved between her five homes on a daily basis). The homes gradually stitched together, just as Natalija's life eventually did. The tensions, love, charm, nature, and modernism that emanate from them provide an excellent starting point for continuing the technique of stitched drawing today. From here, the personal narrative unfolds in an astonishing range – from the thread of life, mythically anchored in women's hands, to traditional women's chores associated with sewing and canvas.

5 Homes (polyptych), 2018, stitched drawing on canvas, 100 x 150 cm (each)
 

Tjaša Rener (born 1986, Slovenj Gradec) is a visual artist who has been living and working between Slovenia and Ghana for over a decade. In her multimedia practice, she explores themes of identity, space, and memory. Her current work is deeply influenced by her personal experience of living by Lake Bosumtwi in the heart of Ghana. There, she examines changes in the local residents’ way of life, as well as the broader social, historical, and ecological context of the area. In her latest project, Rener approaches the subject with a socially conscious, decolonial perspective, reflecting on the impact of globalization on the complexity of African reality. Through the medium of photography, she subtly captures cultural shifts that often go unnoticed, interpreting them through her own transcultural experience.

Mirko Rajnar, one of the best-known contemporary painters in the Prekmurje region, started out on his painting career in the 1980s. First concentrating on expressive figuration, his work was marked by dark hues, rough textures and sombre moods. At the turn of the millennium, however, he moved on to lyrical abstraction, where colour and light play a key role. Since then, utilizing his distinctive technique of colour layering and subtle light effects, Rajnar’s painting has been conveying a compelling visual experience. In his works, nature emerges as a vehicle for evoking mood, never as a subject for imitation or narrative. As superb visual haikus, the powerful appeal of Rajnar's canvases lies in their Zen-like simplicity. In an era of visual noise, they provide a space of retreat and spiritual exploration.

Katarina Snoj's paintings show images inhabiting blank canvases, where, distanced from external representation, they reflect on the role and meaning of painting at a time the image has become deeply embedded in our everyday actuality. The transformation of the visible world into a world of absent images, a world beyond the saturated image-making, constitutes a breakpoint in expanding the perception of perceptual reality as well as in adopting a new position towards it. The abstracting of visible reality frees the image from allusions to objects, deconstructs the gaze and creates discomfort in alienating it from concrete meaning and sense. Confronting the void, where everything seems to stand still and burst forth at the same time, calls for a reconsidered position by way of the awareness that the visibility of the image is invariably linked to its absence and that meanings are created in dialogue with the void and its ambiguity.

In unfolding the pictorial surface, the depicted voids surpass the representational possibilities of the visible, where the picture, in its role of pure signifier, means nothing and represents nothing. The narrative absence is emphasised through minimal painterly interventions that fill the voids in their performative mode. The painting displays its own characteristics and processes that occur either within or without the painting, on its surface. The transparency of the painting surface with its visible frames and sub-frames takes on an object-like character, where the image is dematerialised through the materiality of the medium. The present absence thus forms an integral part of the painting, the images crossing into an in-between space of perception, where the autonomy of visual perception is devalued and relegated to other senses.

In a departure from the conventional perception of the painting and its aesthetic value, Katarina Snoj's painting practice examines the persuasiveness of the painting medium, where in penetrating the established ways of thinking (non-)object phenomena, the artist deepens the questions of how else to think the painting, how the painting can capture the image and how this image appears through the viewer's perception. In particular, whether there are ways in which the viewer can think the image beyond any connotative and pragmatic suggestions and still be able to understand oneself and the world.

Tina Gerlec (1982, Maribor) holds a Master’s degree in economics from the University of Vienna and pursued a career in advertising as a self-employed professional for a number of years. In 2023, with the aim of showcasing current artistic output, Gerlec founded the Tkalka Gallery of Contemporary Art in Maribor, whose vision is implemented through bringing together young emerging artists, freelance curators and young critics. In 2024, within the context of the gallery, she launched a new initiative, “Mladi kritik” (Young Critic), a mentorship programme with a permanent column of exhibition reviews in the newspaper Večer.

Katarina Snoj (2002, Ljubljana) is completing her undergraduate first-degree study programme in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In addition to painting, she also works in installation, graphic art and photography. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most notably at Media Nox, DobraVaga and Mala galerija Banke Slovenije, at +MSUM as part of a workshop with Aleksandra Vajd and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, and has held a solo show at the Odprto obrobje gallery. Her areas of activity occasionally include curatorship and art criticism.
 

In her artistic practice, painter Ajda Kadunc examines the prevailing anthropocentric model of thinking and acting, which – in constant pursuit of progress – has plunged humanity into a complex state of social, economic, ecological and, ultimately, moral crisis. In this context, the artist deals with uncertainty and meaninglessness as temporal markers that testify to the disintegration of familiar structures and hierarchies, while at the same time opening up space for the development of new, alternative ways of thinking, living and acting. Alongside new theoretical definitions of nature, life processes, the relationship between the domesticated and the wild, and non-hierarchical interspecies relations, the artist relies on the findings of phenomenology, and day-to-day (contemplative) practices such as gathering, localizing in and moving through space as her main points of reference. The artist follows this logic of movement and embodiment in space also in the very painting process and in creating the pictorial composition. With its processuality, the technique of dry brush oil painting allows her to experiment with forms and images in a gradual and intuitive way. The artist is primarily interested in the disruptions, errors and coincidences that occur in the process and their potential for creating new meanings. Her visual vocabulary emerges in-between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the real and the imaginary. It consists of varicoloured structures and textures seemingly substantiated by both non-human and human beings. Underground tunnels, plant tendrils, feelers, tentacles, nets, fences, cracks, wounds and tissues spread across the two-dimensional canvas penetrating the very depths of the pictorial space, where – in constant flux – they take their place and assert their presence. Ajda Kadunc's works are fictional and fluid narratives that, with their narrative potential and in creating an open field of meaning, offer a means of accessing possible new realities.
Živa Kleindienst


Ajda Kadunc (1995, Ljubljana) is a visual artist working in painting and installation. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2024. During her studies she also attended Taideyliopiston Kuvataideakatemia in Helsinki. Her solo exhibitions have been held, among others, at Prostor 2^32 (Ljubljana, 2024), the TKALKA Gallery (Maribor, 2024) and, in collaboration with Aleksandra Saška Gruden, the Alkatraz Gallery (Ljubljana, 2023). She has also taken part in several group exhibitions, locally and internationally.

Živa Kleindienst (1987, Maribor) has a BA in in art history. After graduating from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, Kleindienst studied visual culture and curating at Aalto University in Helsinki. She is the Exhibition Programme Coordinator at the UGM Maribor Art Gallery. Since 2024 she has been a member of the Expert Committee on Visual and Intermedia Arts of the Prešeren Fund Management Board. Previously, as a self-employed cultural professional, she collaborated with various national and international galleries, festivals and artists.

Erik Mavrič ranks among Slovenia’s most important artists working in drawing. Interested primarily in monumental drawing, his preferred medium is charcoal, a technique best suited to the themes of his artistic reflections in terms of form and symbolism. He draws discomforting scenes that appear to be woven from fantasy and a figment of the artist's imagination, but are in fact rooted in his careful observation of the structure of our world. In this series, too, he delves into the dark depths of humanity. However, whereas a few years ago he analysed the self-poisoning of society with allegories of possible dystopian futures, he here remains in the present. We gaze at an utterly violent depiction of the consequences of human self-destructiveness, rooted in the mindless glorification of power and the deification of progress.

A sequenced line of one and the same image fastened with large nails. Is it a portrait, a self-portrait, an image, a face? How many images are there in this photograph? How many images does it take to find a likeness that is one’s own? Tanja Lažetić works on her face using the technique of photomontage. She literally dissects, disassembles and composes her own portrait. She sometimes adds, and other times subtracts colour, light, slits, changing sharpness and contrasts, as well as moving, shifting, borrowing parts of her image. Through the process of photograph manipulation, which forms part of the series Brez naslova, samo številke (Untitled, Just Numbers), she searches for the possible ideals of a perfect image. She is exploring to what extent the visually manipulated image is still one’s own portrait, whether it has an identity of its own, its own Self. To what extent it still contains the Ego, and to what extent the Other, a stranger? With the technology available to us, we can rework our own likenesses to the extreme in our desire to achieve today’s beauty ideals and attract attention. We flood social media with (self)portraits, shared "intimately" with friends and the wider world. To what extent do these images even capture an authentic moment and memory, and to what extent are they a construct of narcissistic self-images and franchise ideals? Portraits have become mere backdrops to images, bereft of identities, captured moments that are already disintegrating memories. Drawing on the tradition of feminist avant-gardes, Tanja Lažetić uses and exposes her own image to address relevant and at the same time universal social issues of banality, ordinariness, consumption and transience, as well as the disintegration of (one’s own) immortalised image.

Tanja Lažetič (1967) works in the fields of photography, video, performance, ceramics and artist's book. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at venues that include Moderna galerija Ljubljana (Museum of Modern Art) and MSU Metelkova (Museum of Contemporary Art), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Gagosian Gallery in Paris, Beverly Hills and New York. She is the recipient of several prizes, including the Bronze Award at the Nanjing International Art Festival in China, Third Prize at the Unicum International Ceramics Triennial in Ljubljana and the Rihard Jakopič Award. She has published more than twenty artist's books which form part of museum collections around the world, most notably MoMA New York, Tate London and Bibliotheque Kandinsky Paris.

Meta Kordiš (1978), is an ethnologist, cultural anthropologist and art historian who works as a curator of the NLB Art Collections. She holds a PhD from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is the editor for independent culture for the Dialogi magazine, author and co-author of several exhibitions in the field of modern and contemporary art, as well as curator of the permanent exhibition of the Slovenian Banking Museum (Bankarium). 

Indents and knots, twists and turns, a strange floating mass that resembles a brain. While the object of fascination that is captured in the photograph could be placed in the tradition of abstract sculpture and formalism, its mundanity and banality give us a jolt in the course of aesthetic appraisal, challenging and perhaps even making us laugh.

If it was already pop art that combined high with the low and art with consumerism, the artist is not so much interested in chewing gum as a product that can be bought at every newsagent’s, but as a material that found its way between the gaps of teeth. Chewing, this simple relaxing activity or a small subversion in formal contexts, unconsciously creates tiny abstract sculptures between our teeth, overlooked and discarded. 
These inadvertent products have been the subject of the artist's wonder and exploration for many years. She alienates the familiar object, magnifying it in its already used version, with visible traces of the human and the corporeal. But also the personal – we gaze at impressions of teeth and oral cavity, saliva residues, a document of the inside of the body. This organicity can also arouse revulsion: for the most part, we refrain from looking at what we have chewed; it is something that belongs to the interior of the body. Do we chew gum like we chew on food for thought? 

Nataša Berk's unique portrait recognises the value of the banal and, with photographic magnification, elevates the mundane, stops us in our tracks, alerting us to the fact that a uniqueness and a strange attraction can be found in these unplanned, spontaneous, unusual, bizarre and, some might say, disgusting forms.

 

Nataša Berk (1978) is a diverse and versatile contemporary artist. She operates/works in the broader field of contemporary culture, also through assuming various identities. Her work cannot be categorized or framed within any specific genre. The sharpness of her thoughts is hidden behind the naivety of a child's perception of the world. She describes herself as an ironic-provocative avant-gardist of existentialism with a tangible abstract instinct.

Iza Pevec (1987) graduated in Art History and Comparative Literature. A long-time writer on art and culture, she contributed to Radio Študent, and currently works for Radio Slovenia - Ars programme, also collaborating with the Fotografija magazine. She occasionally curates and has finished training at the School for Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing at the Institute for Contemporary Art SCCA Ljubljana.  
 

Blažka Križan is known for her unique paper cutting technique. Although the jianzhi technique dates back to 2nd century China, the artist's work is fundamentally different from the more commonly seen figural depictions characteristic of the first paper cutouts and the development of the technique. Her abstract motifs, consisting of lines and undulating curves, developed from Križan’s interest in the space between lines, when as a student she made endless drawings of densely flowing lines. In her works Preplet, Navzven, Navzven II and Navzven III, the artist used a scalpel to create prominent organic forms, which, unlike the more geometric ones, are done intuitively. The positioning of a cut creates an optical illusion of movement, as light and dark elements emerge on the relief structure of the lifted cut sections – which could be described as shadow patterns. This whole impression is heightened by the layering of the motif, most notably in the work Preplet. The technique and its elaborateness encourage the viewer to mentally reconstruct the process of creation and thereby invest the work with an element of time. The colour unfolds indirectly, as the light shines through the papercuts, which further emphasizes the three-dimensionality of the surface and reveals links between the motif and the principles of Op Art. The uniformity of the material and the use of basic forms create an enigmatic combination of the simplicity of the basic medium and the complexity of technical precision, inviting the viewer to meditatively perceive patterns that, in their lightness and apparent kineticism, testify to a clear presence of the hand. 

Sara Nuša Golob Grabner 

Blažka Križan (1990, Ptuj) obtained her BA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts (ALUO) in 2012, and completed her Master’s in painting in 2017. While studying she focused on the paper cutting technique. Križan was awarded the Prešeren Student Award for her Master's thesis. In 2018 she received the Primavera DLUM Award from the Maribor Fine Artists Society, and two years later the DLUM Award, while in 2022 she won the Ex-tempore Piran Young Artist Prize. She has held solo exhibitions at the Layer House Gallery, Kino Šiška, DLUM Gallery, Herman Pečarič Gallery Piran, and Bežigrajska galerija 1. She lives and works in Ptuj, Slovenia. 

Sara Nuša Golob Grabner (1994) holds a BA in art history and English and is currently pursuing her Master's degree in art history and English literature and language. A contributor to the Delo newspaper since 2022, she writes exhibition reviews and articles for the V očesu column. For two years she served as Artistic Director of the Maribor Festival of Photography, as well as curating the festival’s numerous exhibitions and translating accompanying texts. Since 2020, she has worked with several Slovenian galleries as a freelance curator. 
 

The young artist Patrik Dvorščak’s creates stunning, occasionally shocking paintings that depict social collapse; rendered in earthy and pink hues, the manifestations of naked bodies, recurrent caricatures, clusters of penises and vulvas, illegible inscriptions and doodles speak of the meaninglessness of human existence, the resulting perversion and ambivalent self-destructiveness. The chaotic, almost abstract paintings fraught with frustration, grotesque violence and eroticism primarily done in monumental formats illustrate the artist’s interest in the paradoxical nature of humankind, which (even if striving towards order and security) is basically destructive and doomed to failure. The process of evading human consciousness and gradually disrupting the balance also defines the painting’s formative process. This process begins in a completely conventional way, with properly drawn figures, correct proportions, meaningful composition and defined space; it displays a tendency towards control and balance. What ensues is a concise deconstruction of the depicted motifs, a gradual distortion of proportions, simplification of figures, disfigurement of previously recognizable shapes, and systematic abandonment of control. The elements of fragmentariness, conflict, tension, anxiety, exaggerated contrasts, destructive perversion and primitive discord come into prominence. The absurdity and deliberate evasion of human consciousness heighten the intensity of everyday scenes, e.g. walking the dog, milking the cow, riding the bus, mowing the grass. The artist’s work captures, in a highly sincere and ecstatic way, the spirit of the time determined by two parallel realities: routine and obscenity, and the ubiquitous divide between considered moral virtue and compulsive, destructive hedonism. 

Patrik Dvorščak (1995) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (ALUO) in 2017, and obtained a master's degree with the thesis “The Unconscious and Primitive Human Action” in 2022. He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including Prague and Chile, ŠKUC Gallery, Miklova hiša Gallery in Ribnica, DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana, Kino Šiška, ZDSLU Gallery and EX Arte Gallery. He has held solo shows at the Krka Gallery in Novo Mesto and the Ljubljana City Hall, exhibiting not only paintings but also installation art. Dvorščak’s art examines social phenomena and the issues of mass formations, offering an insight into human self-destructiveness and refusal of responsibility. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

Maša Žekš (1993) is an art historian and art critic with a BA in East Asian Studies. She is a contributor to the Koridor online platform, writing exhibition reviews and articles on contemporary art; since 2022 she has been editor of Podobe. She has contributed to the Outsider magazine, Membrana Journal and Radio Študent. She has co-curated exhibitions at the Nova Gorica City Gallery, the Mikel House (Miklova hiša) in Ribnica, the Layer House in Kranj and the Kočevje Art Salon. She is a contributor to the Y Gallery and DobraVaga Gallery and a co-founder of Kritiški pose(la)dek, a project dedicated to contemporary art.