Žiga Kariž: "Freud and Self, Alone" opening at the Nova Gorica City Gallery
The opening of "Freud and Self, Alone", an exhibition by Žiga Kariž – one of our most notable visual artists, will be held at the Nova Gorica City Gallery this Friday, 8 January, at 7.00 p.m. The exhibition is a collaboration between Aksioma – Institute for Contemoporary Art, the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana and the Gallery of Fine Arts Slovenj Gradec.
The structure of Žiga Kariž’s works is complex and partly originates from the modernistic tradition.The artist uses this to establish his own fine arts poetics, situated between personal memories and a media image. His latest series of paintings draws upon Matisse and his series of nudes (Nu Bleu I–IV) from 1952, which show the female body with crossed legs and an arm stretched above the her head. The result is a collage that derives from the long-standing tradition of the nude, which effectively subsided with the Mattisse collages, with incorporated pornographic details of female pornstars. Kariž reminds us how, through the history of art, certain nudes could always shock the public with their alleged indecency, while he simultaneously also shows us pornography as a popular variant of the classical nude.
Žiga Kariž is a painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. He is a graduate of the very same Academy, where he also completed his Master’s under Professor Gorenc. He is currently living and working in Ljubljana.