Silvester Plotajs Sicoe, an academic painter, presents his most extensive and in-depth overview exhibition to date at the City Art Gallery Ljubljana. The exhibition, entitled How to Dream Backwards?, is a carefully conceived selection of works in which the artist has attained personal painterly and narrative maturity – the refinement he has persistently, thoroughly, and patiently pursued since the very beginning of his career.

Silvester Plotajs Sicoe’s creative path began, developed, and consolidated through the figure and the world of objects, each entering the artist’s painterly reflection in its own way. From the outset of his artistic practice, he understood bodies and objects – figural images as motivic painterly energies – as malleable and flexible visual forces capable of developing vividly and powerfully across the pictorial space, transitioning from conceptual premises into clearly articulated and convincing visual organisms. Immediately after completing his studies and continuing to the present day, he has deliberately and energetically created and organised these organisms into series, cycles, or independent works, depending on his immediate sensibility and thought.

The painter conceives pictorial space as a chromatically clear and precisely geometrically defined element in which the depiction of figures and objects is frequently linked to a certain narrativity, as confirmed by the carefully conceived subtitles of individual works. In his paintings, intense colour fields divide various psychologically modified landscapes in which figures and objects are transformed into forceful concreteness, articulated through expressive visual systems with a visually identifiable, yet often decentralised core. Varied colour tones and gradually intensified light reflections shape the plasticity of figural masses, most often without pronounced spatial depth. Flatness is emphasised, which the artist gradually disrupts through the use of differently sized, including very large-scale formats.

Silvester Plotajs Sicoe (b. 1965, Ljubljana) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana under Professor Emerik Bernard in 1988 and continued his postgraduate studies in painting with Professor Gustav Gnamuš and in printmaking with Professor Lojze Logar. In 1990, he furthered his studies with Professor Martin Tissing at the Minerva Academy in Groningen, the Netherlands. Since 1992, he has worked as an independent artist. As a freelance artist, he creates at the Švicarija Creative Centre in Ljubljana.

Curator of the exhibition: Dr Sarival Sosič, PhD.

Silvester Plotajs Sicoe: How to Dream Backwards?

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Silvester Plotajs Sicoe: Pogovor o sodobnem slikarstvu / Conversation on Contemporary Painting, 2026

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Producer: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana Curator: Sarival Sosič Artist: Silvester Plotajs Sicoe Texts by: dr. Sarival Sosič, Božidar Zrinski Coordination and production: Maruša Meglič Technical realization: MGML Technical Department Design: Studio Kruh The project was made possible by: City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture