MG+MSUM

ARTEMIC #3 | Bisons of Andraž Šalamun
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Curator Martina Vovk, PhD, who curated Andraž Šalamun’s retrospective exhibition in 2016, says about his work:

 

“In the preparatory stages of Andraž Šalamun’s retrospective exhibition I came across his account of the background of his famous series of bison. Šalamun writes about the day he went to the Ljubljana zoo as a student. There he saw a bison. The encounter was pivotal, a trigger. The mighty wild beast turned and gazed directly at him, and he found the incredible power behind its gaze hardly bearable. The experience was so overwhelming Šalamun ran straight home and started painting the animal. He painted it in his self-taught manner, untouched by academic procedures: placing an inordinately large ungrounded canvas on the floor, he painted impulsively, without too many sketches. This was how Šalamun’s bison series started, probably his best known series and best loved by the public. Later I learned that Šalamun’s bison paintings were popular also in the United States, where a number were sold. Apparently, what Americans saw in the bison was the free, indomitable spirit of the Wild West and its pioneers who transformed the ‘wilderness’ into the ‘new world’ (despite the fact that the systematic extermination of bison in the 19th century in reality meant the genocide of Native Americans; an aspect the narrative of conquerors does not stress unnecessarily). Thus a bison from the Ljubljana zoo, rendered in Šalamun’s impulsive artistic formulation, crossed the Atlantic to unwittingly become, in that cultural context, a victorious symbol of a nation. A symbol the artist’s intention could not possibly have conceived.”

 
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