In formulating his own painting processes he has – remaining faithful to the idea of freedom – time and again boldly entered the field of contemporary fine arts and gradually established his own original conceptual mechanisms for portraying the topic addressed.

Already during his university years at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Ljubljana, Šušnik was known for possessing detailed knowledge of the trends, directions, and movements in European and American art. He felt especially drawn to American abstract expressionism, which he first became acquainted with while living and studying in London and New York, and then subsequently – after finishing his specialization in Ljubljana – also during the time of his master’s degree program at the Pratt Institute in New York. Therefore, it is no coincidence that as early as in the 1970s, he critically analysed modernist painting, which he further developed in the process of reorganizing the image – first, in the “quasi modernist” manner, from which he later gradually diverged into a post-modern experience of art, i.e. into incorporating the viewer’s view into the image. He achieved this either by means of his syncretistic drawings, which, allowing for multiple interpretations, are variations of expressive-to-calm-tone layers of colour, or by means of shaped paintings and his most recent illuminated objects – so-called electrographics or objects with an integrated source of light.

Šušnik, also a superb scenographer in the Slovene avant-garde theatre, as evidenced by having received all of the most prestigious awards in Slovenia, was noticed early on by the professional public, which included his works in nearly all of the most important overviews of selected works of contemporary Slovene and former Yugoslav art, as well as in national collections. Of such, at least the following two should be mentioned: the retrospective cross-section of the artist’s work that the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana (Moderna galerija) prepared even before his fiftieth birthday, and his participation in the Sao Paulo Biennial, for which his works were selected by a foreign curator.

The current exhibition has been designed in a manner which might be somewhat uncommon as regards overview exhibitions. Due to the large format of Šušnik’s paintings and the spatial limitations of the gallery, we were forced to leave out a number of the artist’s key and well-known works of art. Such have been included in numerous earlier presentations addressing various defined themes and issues, therefore, on this occasion the focus is on those works from private and public collections which are less known or have been viewed less. Some of them are presented here for the first time.

Tugo Šušnik: Quasimodo (1971-2017)

Tugo Šušnik, so it seems, could not have defined his forty-four years of artistic activity in the public eye in a more radical manner and with more self-irony than he ...