Jože Tisnikar
After the Cataclysm III, 1975
oil-tempera on paper, 86 x 61 cm
Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti, Slovenj Gradec
The painting speaks of World War II, when I was still a boy back in our village. One time I saw a large number of slain partisans and Germans in the valley, as well as many dead horses. Much later, when I was thinking about wartime, I wanted to show what happens when people lose their sense of sound judgment. A scene that stuck in my mind was that of a horse that had survived and just stood there, with dead bodies lying all around. The horse was frightened and perplexed, unable to fathom what the people were doing, killing one another and animals.
The horse in the picture too stands stationary, petrified amidst corpses. Its rider is lying at its feet. The horse is foamy with sweat from galloping.
Tisnikar’s description of the motif from: Nebojša Tomašević, Tisnikar, svet obujenih mrtvecev (Belgrade: Jugoslovenska revija, Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1978), © 1978 Revija, p. 138.
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Jože Tisnikar was born in Mislinja near Slovenj Gradec in 1928, and died in 1998 in Slovenj Gradec. Before the war he attended four years of elementary school, and after the war a six-month nursing course while doing military service. Back home he went to work as an orderly at the hospital in Slovenj Gradec. There he met the hospital director, Dr. Stane Strnad, who was the first to encourage him to express himself artistically and remained his supporter, even through his worst period of alcoholism. Strnad introduced him to painter Karel Pečko, who was Tisnikar’s artistic mentor for the next ten years. When the hospital opened a pathology department, Tisnikar was employed there as an autopsy assistant and remained there until his retirement in 1986. He worked mostly at night, preparing dead bodies for postmortem examinations.
Tisnikar produced mostly drawings and paintings, finding his motifs in his work environment and life experiences: hospital patients and the dead on his slab, their families, the wards, the morgue, the glum nighttime atmosphere, crows, crickets, apparitions from delirium etc. The value of his paintings was soon recognized by art critics if not the general public, and in 1961 he started presenting his work in exhibitions; after 1963, at the shows of the Slovene Fine Artists’ Association. In 1979, he was included in the major survey exhibition Slovene Art 1945–1978 at Moderna galerija Ljubljana. He regularly took part in art colonies. Two exhibitions in particular were met with special acclaim – a solo show at Mala galerija (Moderna galerija’s project space) in Ljubljana in 1980, and a great retrospective at the Koroška Fine Art Gallery in Slovenj Gradec in 1998; the latter museum has the largest number of his works in its collection. He received a Prešeren Foundation Award in 1970, and posthumously the Silver Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia in 1999. In 2003, his monument was unveiled in Slovenj Gradec. His work is the subject of several monographs (1978, 1986, 1996) and documentary films (1963, 1978, 1998, 2012), and he also did an acclaimed set design for the puppet show The Dead Man Comes for His Sweetheart in 1986.
