Discussion and opening: Tuesday, 11 November 2014, at 7 p.m., Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
Duration: 11 November 2014 — 4 January 2015
Curator: Igor Španjol
Arjan Pregl's artistic practice expands into social space, making use of and critically reflecting (on) various available media. Taking into consideration his own role in society, Pregl develops critical, political, and resistance strategies. In his paintings, he builds open, internally contradictory, heteronomous, and multilayered structures based on the tensions between the visual (and sometimes textual and conceptual) fragments. The structure of the paintings in The Five-Minute Revolution has been greatly influenced by the possibilities of technical production and manipulation. The structure of the pictorial field is based on photographs of two, formally and ideologically contrastingly positioned public sculptures by Drago Tršar. Pregl has "removed" the monuments, replacing them with an appropriately enlarged decorative "hobby" sculpture. Such technical reproduction does not exclude manual work: the paintings are produced in the traditional techniques of pencil and oil on canvas, but the role and significance of the procedure have been considerably altered in and by the new context. Replacing the emotionally and polemically charged monuments with banal abstract color masses made from Fimo modeling clay is a critical and ironic reference to the relativism of aesthetics and the political revisionism of our time and place.
The exhibition is part of the Draft series, presenting young artists and new ideas at the +MSUM.
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Arjan Pregl (born in 1973) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1998. In 2001 he completed postgraduate studies in painting at the same academy, attending the final semester at the IUP Indiana University of Pennsylvania (USA). He then went on to pursue postgraduate studies in printmaking, which he completed in 2004. He works in the fields of painting, printmaking, illustration, and design and has won several awards for his work. He lives and works in Ljubljana.
