Klara Debeljak, Ljubljana-born artist, whose family partly originates in San Francisco, is about to complete her studies of humanities in Prague, the Czech Republic. Having graduated from a secondary school of design, she has been working by herself on her attitude towards fine art techniques ranging from collage and murals to illustration, while also combining digital and analogue approaches. She uses overplayed figuration as a playful means to reflect on modern societies, and finds toying with various layers or transferring between layers a constant inspiration.

The illustration triptych Shadows depicts directed crowds in environments of considerable competitive focus, visual saturation and globalised nature. Shadows are used primarily as a reflection of the depicted matter and as the depiction of figures in their transparent state, which can also be understood in the sense of their having become either insensitive or oversensitive in such environments.
What is it that holds us on the surface of our chaotic life? The sense of community and of having a fixed central point? Maybe the shadows are us, people, the fragmented pieces of (imagined) communities, hasting and seeking the unknown, barely raising our heads, giving a shy look, expressing fragile connectedness?
The shadows of our abilities, trapped in the hunt for our own abstract ideas, needs and the demands of the structures that embody, almost invisibly, the power of multiple (automated) social patterns.

—Petra Radoja, curator