Displays of Transience

The paintings on display are dedicated to the German philosopher Walter Benjamin.

His literary opus was the key inspiration for Natalia Šeruga Golob's paintings in the series of recent years: the Collection of W.B., Postcards for W.B. and Addressed to W.B.
The foreground of Natalia Šeruga Golob's paintings is dominated by shapes and things, which are shown as both arriving and disappearing from the background as a kind of premonition of something new. The surfaces of the paintings, marked by unusual and mysterious strokes, merge with the background in the darkness into irregular shapes. Complemented by densely embroidered frames with rounded edges, the painted images give the appearance of a mysterious past as well as a present world.
The artist's paintings lead us into the unknown beyond the understood or the already seen. A characteristic feature of her paintings is that, with the translucency of the top layers of colour and the partial overlapping of the background, they create an apparent disappearance and passing into the unknown. This translucency of the colour layers reminiscent of veils and mists has an ethereal effect and is a metaphor for emergence, while the dark backgrounds of the paintings represent the realm of the unknown past and transience.
Miloš Bašin

Artist’s text about the exhibition:
... all this because of the search and hunt for Presence. Meanwhile, the turning back of time has long since tamed me. Time is my eternal and elusive rival in this pointless pursuit. Time as a creator that leaves stunning abstract images on things. Studio work is an interplay of different kinds of coincidences (material and spirit), of the painter's métier and of tradition. Tradition, as T.S. Eliot puts it, cannot be inherited, but must be acquired through effort. The impressions of the various giants of all kinds of spirit who had lived before me are inevitably embedded in me. Thus, spatial and temporal expansions come into play as I work.
In recent years, I have added the word “Collection” to the material remains of my work with a title (after Walter Benjamin's Untidy Child).
Untidy Child. Each stone he finds, each flower picked and each butterfly caught is already the start of a collection, and every single thing he owns makes up one great collection. In him this passion shows its true face, the stern Indian expression which lingers on, but with a dimmed and manic glow, in antiquarians, researchers, bibliomaniacs. Scarcely has he entered life than he is a hunter. He hunts the spirits whose trace he scents in things; between spirits and things years are passed in which his field of vision remains free of people. His life is like a dream: he knows nothing lasting; everything seemingly happens to him by chance. His nomad-years are hours in the forest of dream.
Natalija Šeruga Golob, 2024

[1] Thomas Stearns Eliot: Tradicija in individualni talent, translated into Slovene by Janez Stanek and Veno Taufer, CZ, Nobelovci 36 Collection, Ljubljana, 1977, pg. 223.
[2] Walter Benjamin; One- Way Street and Other Writings, NLB, London, 1971 (Translators Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter), p. 73.

Natalija Šeruga Golob was born in 1971 in Maribor. Studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, obtaining her BA in 1999 and MA in 2003. She regularly holds exhibitions and showcases her work in various collections in Slovenia, Austria and Italy. She lives and works in Radenci.