Born in 1956 in Ljubljana, Bojan Gorenec studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he has worked as professor of painting and drawing since 1996 (also serving several terms as dean). His artistic production is based on in-depth investigation and analysis of artworks. In addition to painting, he is involved in art theory and philosophy of art. His contributions to the theory of phenomenology of visual perception, coupled with his simultaneous exploration and testing of the processes of perception in his own artistic practice, left a significant mark on the art production of the 1980s. Not surprisingly, he became one of the most recognizable artists of his generation, with a major survey exhibition of his work staged as early as 1990 at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.

The exhibition at the Mestna galerija is putting on display an extensive cross-section of Gorenec’s oeuvre, accompanied by a study written by Dr. Tomislav Vignjević, who has been following and critically assessing the artist’s work for years, as well as by the artist’s own theoretical essay on the current status of painting.

The title How Paintings Emerge is a reference to Gorenec’s eponymous 1982 solo exhibition at the ŠKUC Gallery, alluding more generally to his early creative period when the groundwork for the subsequent evolution of his artistic output was laid in reflection on and investigation of the medium, its expressive possibilities, the specifics of painting at a time saturated with images, and the question of the emergence of an image. The early 1990s saw a turn to thematising the figure and the systems of representation in modern painting, followed by reflection on the media’s mediation of reality. A painting becomes the arena in which various systems of representation are confronted, intertwine, and complement one another, in harmony or discord between the several representative possibilities of the image and spatial concepts, inundating the viewer with the visual complexity of the images, be it canonical works from the past or fragments of visuality in the world of today, following the iconic turn.

Bojan Gorenec: How Paintings Emerge (Paintings 1979-2014)

Following the first presentation of Bojan Gorenec’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana) in 1990 (entitled Painting 1982–1990), "How Paintings Emerge (1979–2014)" exhibition is one of ...