City Art Gallery of Ljubljana announces its annual programme for 2019

In April, the gallery will inaugurate the survey exhibition of Marjan Gumilar. In his artistic practice, moving in the constant interaction between emotion and ratio, the painter has been exploring the autonomy of colour and its laws within a wide spectrum of thematizations and reflections of immediate reality, ranging from nature to a tangible, physical painting, an object. Next in line will be the international group exhibition “Evidence”, featuring artists who have presented their works at the Tobacco 001 Cultural Centre over the last seven years. These are artists from Slovenia and abroad who put their works on display on completion of their two-month artist-in-residency, as well as Slovenian artists selected through MGML’s public invitations to participate in artist-in-residency abroad. Their artistic practices offer reflections on the complex issues of contemporary society: failed social experiments that have led to the dehumanization of living conditions, the rise and fall of totalitarian states, tensions created by post-colonial immigration, being locked in technological determinism and social media, as well as the destruction of the environment in the name of progress.

In the second half of the year, the gallery will inaugurate an international group exhibition curated by the Romanian curator and art critic Raluca Voinea. The exhibition will centre on the Suez Canal and “channels” it opens – from its history, connections in the region (Trieste, Vienna), to political games that the construction of the canal entailed. The City Art Gallery of Ljubljana will close off the year with a survey exhibition of Jiři Bezlaj, whose fifty-year sculpting opus has yielded numerous sculpture series and cycles and left a recognizable mark on contemporary Slovenian sculpture.