Ana Sluga, a contemporary painter and visual artist born in 1981 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, earned her bachelor’s degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and later pursued a master’s degree in Tallinn, Estonia. In her work, she often explores everyday objects, memory, identity, and humanity’s relationship with modern technology. Her paintings are characterised by precision, subtle colours, and thoughtful symbolism.

The selected series of paintings, Passive Torso (2021–25), explores contemporary human presence through depictions of nameless figures captured in moments of quotidian stillness, observation, and quiet activity. The paintings portray anonymous figures devoid of clear identity or individual narrative. Their posture is restrained – often aloof – creating the impression of observers detached from their surroundings, or bodies caught in routine gestures and unspoken relationships. It is precisely within this apparent inactivity that the central tension of the series unfolds – a reflection on contemporary passivity, emotional distance, and quiet alienation.

Through her minimalist figurative style and subtle atmosphere, Ana Sluga creates scenes that feel almost cinematic – like isolated fragments of a larger narrative, yet never fully explained. Rather than portraying specific individuals, the figures function as universal embodiments of states of being – fatigue, waiting, observation, resignation, or simply existence within time.

The Passive Torso series does not offer unambiguous answers, but instead invites viewers into a space of quiet reflection on contemporary humanity, its role as observer, and the increasingly fragile nature of human presence in a world saturated by constant activity and informational noise.
 

The wall-mounted composition is distinctive both in form and in concept. The artist refers to the individual pieces as "frames", as if attempting to deny the objects any artistic or symbolic value, while in fact emphasising – through aestheticisation and the narrative behind the framed fragments – precisely their artistic and symbolic nature.

The frames contain detritus – or rather, the vestiges of the infrastructure that carried and transmitted information and data, forming the material foundation for artworks staged within the ubiquitous medium of the internet. In 2011, the artist ritually deleted these artworks from the server and titled this act of performance art Expunction. The veneration of ruins has played an important role in European culture and art since the Renaissance and, in the 19th century with Romanticism, charting a form of spirituality that moved away from God while retaining notions of infinity and the incomprehensible. The works of art that once existed within these machines no longer survive, at least not in their original forms. They might be reconstructed in a museum or restoration context, or reinterpreted in a manner akin to musicians performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions on instruments that did not exist in the 18th century. Perhaps.

The wall-mounted composition consists of 18 (originally 20) carefully arranged and framed hardware fragments, along with a conditionally anthropomorphic robot. With its frontal presence, the robot is distinctly totemic, an idol of sorts. The frames, mounted in what seems a haphazard manner, appear to defy gravity, floating in their own cloud, a stellar nebula, and constitute the infinity and indeterminacy that lend meaning to a static figure.

Štromajer has distributed nearly all of the frames among friends and acquaintances whom he trusts to safeguard them with care and mindfulness, thereby creating a unique network of custodians. These individual frames, held in private collections, most likely hang on walls perfectly vertical in the manner of traditional pictures, thus becoming icons that – like fragments of a hologram – symbolically contain within them the whole from which they originate.
 

The exhibition will be closed from April 23 to 25.

The practice of visual artist Dragana Sapanjoš blends personal experience with social critique. She is interested in the body – not as an idealized form, but as a point of pressure, projection, and control. In this exhibition, she moves between the material and the digital, between the fragility of glass and the cool aesthetics of print, revealing how contemporary mythologies shape our understanding of identity, age, and power.

Aging is rude (2013, blown glass, 140 × 100 cm) explores aging in a time that no longer grants old age its rightful place. Once synonymous with wisdom and authority, aging is now perceived as almost rude – something to conceal, smooth over, or erase. The blown-glass inscription is quiet and fragile rather than aggressive; its legibility shifts with the distancing of the gaze, much like the visibility of the aging body in public space. Glass,both transparent and breakable, underscores transience, while also highlighting our attempts to hide it.

The work Become another man again (2023, print) shifts into the digital sphere of simulation. The figure of the Wizard hovers in a new dimension as the controller of a world in which ordinary people become avatars. The pyramid above his head – borrowed from The Sims –symbolises a state of achievement, a freedom that is in fact conditioned by the game’s algorithm. To the side of the artwork, a figure borrowed from Bosch’s imaginary appears, almost a pop icon trying to whisper something, yet unable to assert any real influence.
Both works can be read through the prism of the transhumanist promise of eternal youth. We used to hide our wrinkles; now we are promised bodily enhancements, life in the cloud, and digital immortality – an extended version of The Matrix. Yet this gleaming vision of perpetual optimization reveals itself as a new form of control: youth becomes a program, the body a platform, and the human being a character in a game the rules of which are set by another.

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).