City Art Gallery Ljubljana Presents Its Programme for 2021

The City Art Gallery Ljubljana enters the new year with Dragica Čadež’s overview exhibition entitled A Story of Wood and Clay. One of the most prominent Slovenian sculptresses repeatedly descends into the world of forms and perceptions, the world of the wooden miracle that nature so generously offers us. The exhibition at the City Art Gallery Ljubljana is designed analytically, systematically and dynamically, as the artist sets up many of her sculptures not only as independent works, but also as distinct spatial installations with strong geometric accents.

The above exhibition will be followed by a solo show of Jože Barši, who entered the art scene at the end of the 1980s as a member of the New Slovenian Sculpture movement and visibly marked the development of Slovenian contemporary visual art after 1990. An important point in Barši’s oeuvre is his consideration of an exhibition as an artwork and a field for researching and representing the process of human thought. In the recent period, the last became one of his key topics and will also be the main point of his exhibition project at the City Art Gallery Ljubljana. The ambient and multi-media exhibition will be a synthesis of the artist’s heretofore work and research on two important human thought processes – learning and forgetting.

In 2021, the City Art Gallery Ljubljana and the Tobačna Gallery will host When Gesture Becomes Event, a group exhibition created in cooperation with Künstlerhaus in Vienna, where it has been on view since December 2020. The exhibition features works by Anna Artaker, Nika Autor, Renate Bertlmann, Katharina Cibulka, Lana Čmajčanin, Magdalena Frey, Anna Jermolaewa, Roberta Lima, Polonca Lovšin, Dorit Margreiter, Ursula Mayer, Marjetica Potrč, Constanze Ruhm, Maruša Sagadin and The Golden Pixel Cooperative. In the framework of the exhibition, the artists ask whether and under which conditions an individual gesture interrupts a seemingly natural course of things and how this gesture can consequently become an event or a connecting force between people. Sixteen polyphonic, critical, constructive and imaginative voices create a feminist vocabulary that includes strategies, forms of action and utopian approaches with which it is possible to rethink collective action, cooperation, solidarity and shared existences.

Next on view will be an overview exhibition of the artist Samo, which will be his most extensive presentation to date. In his own way, Samo ploughs the field of fine arts and persistently follows a path that cannot be placed in any art trend or movement, which is why he is, plainly and simply, a unique artist. We recognise him by his direct and lively graphic communication, in which he constantly checks both the graphic language, for which he seeks new possibilities of expression, and the carriers of the images, that is, the materials. As he takes the latter mostly from his environment, they consist of already used materials, which he inventively transfers to the field of fine arts.