Nose and Bill
The nose and its variations, appearance and general complexity connect both exhibitions with the help of with the micro-location of the Bežigrad Gallery. On display are paintings, drawings and repetitions of the nose and beak and the relationship between the two.
This idea was generated in light of recent events and circumstances, including last year's Documenta festival, which was overshadowed by the "Jewish nose" scandal. A short while ago I also re-read Oton Župančič's poem “Turek”, which some see as problematic due to the main character's long nose.
I consider the nose and beak as extremely contextual, political (perhaps even contentious) and sexual (both carry a certain sexual connotation), but they can also be completely neutral elements that can fit easily into any type of art.
While some of the works in the exhibition explore these themes more extensively, I have recently been playing with form more often, seeking shapes and their abstraction and concretisation – exploring and developing the nose as an element of my practice. The beak, and specifically the duck’s bill, is a regular feature in my work. Bringing these two elements together opens up fresh opportunities for observation, reading and interpretation.
Žiga Kariž
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The logic of Kariž’s show also seems to be testimony to this, where classical art protocols, exhibition figures and artistic idioms become the means in this process – that is, the exhibition ‘Nose and Beak’ is at the same time an exhibition on noses and beaks as well ason the way art operates. There are numerous meta-artistic moments that illustrate this; through them Kariž plays with the form of the nose and with its denotative and connotative aspects in relation to the complex web of contexts through which it passes. This is fully obvious in the assured exploitation of diverse idioms of painting through which the nose wanders on its path of redemption. However, the exhibition itself behaves “meta-exhibitionally” on this path of dissection and reflection of methods of making visual systems, including artistic ones. On the one hand, then, ‘Nose and Beak’, with its representative sampling and use of pastiche through various painting media, formats, idioms and materials, creates the impression of a ‘gallery’, a representative collection or a unique exhibition of ‘masters’ of the nose. On the other, it evokes the format of a retrospective, introduced by Kariž’s ‘early work’ created during his studies, with excursions into other ‘periods’ of artistic creation. In this juggling of artistic conventions, we can read a very subtle irony, where the nose moves from the field of explicit political struggles to the realm of a purely internal artistic problem – that is, one that requires thorough formal study and morphological and stylistic analysis. The irony is deepened by the autobiographical moment of the artist’s nose, which,  smuggled into ‘Noses in the Picture’in the form of a photocollage, constitutes a clear intrusion of a completely different register of reality and shows how, in art, things can never in fact remain merely an ‘internal’ artistic problem. How things are always more complex in the visual, and particularly in painting as its privileged and therefore politically most charged lever. This is perhaps also the key parallel between the nose and painting: both are deeply compromised fields in which meanings slide about relentlessly. Unfortunately this exhibition will not enable us to redeem the nose, as much as we try to do so through rationalisation and political correctness, as the allusion to Zupančič’s poem ‘The Turk at Work’ implies. This unfortunate bulge in the middle of our face will always be an excess that we don’t know how to deal with. Painting cannot whitewash anything for us in this respect; at most, it shows its counter-productiveness. By evoking all the conflicts of a visual existence, ‘Nose and Beak’ unapologetically and uncomfortably forces us to confront us with what we lack.
Vladimir Vidmar
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Žiga Kariž was born in 1973 in Ljubljana.
He graduated in painting from ALU UL in 1973 and completed a painting specialisation at ALU UL in 2001.
Exhibited his work Terror = Decor: Art Now in 2003 in the Slovenian Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale
Began an artistic collaboration in 2007 with artists Janez Janša and Janez JanšaŽ
Employed at ALUO UL since 2010 as an instructor at the Department of Painting
Co-founded an “artist-run” gallery in 2015 with a group of artists in the Šiška area of Ljubljana GalleryGallery, which is part of the art project Made in China
In 2021, the same group of artists in the Ljubljana area of Bežigrad established an “artist-run” gallery GalleryGallery – 2, where Kariž also lives and works.