Expanding Sculptural Structures

The City Art Gallery Ljubljana's latest thematic research and exhibition of sculptural pieces by Slovene sculptors explores and offers an insight into the expansion of sculptural structures. As a continuation of the 2012 exhibition Paths through Sculpture, which presented eleven contemporary Slovene sculptors, "Expanding Sculptural Structures" continues to exhibit and explore contemporary Slovene sculpture through a dynamic layout and thematically analytic display of the artists' work that follows the diversity of the authors along the axes of their generational relationships as well as their material variety.

The exhibition showcases the works of several different artists who work with various materials but always retain a traditional understanding of sculpture as a materially active phenomenon, something manually crafted, processed or derived through the means of various contemporary interventions. In this way, sculptures still fulfill, through a mostly modernistic approach, the function of ideas turned into solid, tangible images, memorizing the impulses of the past and present as sculptural documents intersecting relations, causality, definitions and expressions. Thus, we are able to trace the expansion of sculptural structures across various levels of themes and contents on an ontological plane, then on a material-technical and finally a symbolic-metaphoric plane. All of these are joined together in the final representative event, the exhibition.

The selection of sculptors featuring such names as Dušan Tršar, Jiři Bezlaj, Saba Skaberne, Vera Stanković, Paola Korošec, Primož Pugelj, Tomaž Furlan and Boris Beja is an authorial selection by the curator, striving to present sculpture as a phenomenon with recognizable contents, materially accessible through the method of display, palpable even, but most importantly, presenting the sculptures as those segments within our culture that carry a strong culturological and aesthetic-artistic meaning and leave an indelible mark across the face of our contemporarity.

For it is precisely within sculptural matter that the individual elements and structures are defined, along with the bases and the boundaries of the sculpture, formulating the laws of reciprocal structural relations, defining the points of contact between separate elements, the relations between different series and cycles of works. Thus, a multitude of layers becomes visible, along with their separation, their differences and even the necessity of differentiating between the exposed and the obscured components of the works. The present is the expansion of both technique as well as balance of matter with composition and external and internal structure.

Sarival Sosič, PhD, curator of the exhibition
(From the introductory text in the catalogue)

Expanding Sculptural Structures

With a selected and refined concept these exhibition and catalogue put emphasis on the structure, form, composition, the variety of themes and materials and spatial possibilities of sculpture.