Mito Gegič

4_35 AM

2015, acrylic, adhesive tape on canvas, 180 x 165 cm

Mito Gegič’s motifs are hunting scenes he finds online and then formulates in a unique realistic taping technique as independent artistic motifs, assuming in this way an unequivocally critical attitude to cruelty and violence to animals and the sordid normalization of hunting as a local or national phenomenon. His painting is defined by shocking confrontations with brutal and sadistic images of tortured animals, mostly deer, captured at a distance (usually by automatic cameras mounted on hunting grounds) and the artist’s painstaking, time-consuming “production” of a painting with adhesive tape that transforms the pathological scenes of animal suffering into aestheticized artistic objects. With this twist, Gegič exposes painting (or art in general) as a possible tool of anesthetization of pathological violence, and its critical formulation as the only possible contemporary heir to the traditional painting genre of still lifes with dead animals.

Mito Gegič (born in 1982, Ljubljana, Slovenia) participated in the CEEPUS exchange program on the Fine Art Academy in Zagreb in 2006. Graduated in 2008 in the field of painting on the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Currently working the MFA in painting. Lives and works in Škofja Loka and Ptuj in Slovenia, EU. Web: https://mitogegic.carbonmade.com/