Žiga Kariž

Untitled

2014, ball-point pen on paper, 20,4 x 14,5 cm

Žiga Kariž’s work was already based on painting seen as the intersection of images from the world of mass culture, film, advertising and design; recently, he has added pornography to all this. In this way, his work fundamentally negates any isolation of painting as a medium; rather, the artist treats a painting as an ideal junction of images in a time of visual saturation. The images that end up inhabiting his works are therefore often clearly ephemeral, cheap, kitschy, and shallow to the point of absurdity (which is what pornographic images are, in essence), and so completely interchangeable. This is Kariž’s unique way of commenting on the unselective and unthinking imperative of consuming everything, even absurdly worthless goods.

Žiga Kariž (1973) is a Slovenian visual artist working at the crossroads of classical visual art, mainly painting, conceptual art and new media. He exhibits his artworks all around the world. Since 2010 he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, where he also graduated and completed his master’s degree (under prof. Bojan Gorenc). He lives and works in Ljubljana. Web: http://zigakariz.com/