Photo: Matija Pavlovec / Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
What remains are his numerous illustrations in books and magazines, comic strips, posters, album and CD covers, corporate images, logos – all familiar without most people realizing he was their author. He was a painter at heart, as he said in an interview, but he also exhibited photographs, did set and costume design as well as puppet design.
He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, completing also postgraduate studies under Prof. Zoran Didek and Prof. Maksim Sedej there. As a student he was active in the student protests of 1968, and started publishing illustrations and comic strips in newspapers. This led to book illustration work, where he produced a rich oeuvre of dynamic, colorful, and humorous images.
Gatnik’s first public appearance as a painter was with the so-called Ljubljana circle of expressive figurative artists, exhibiting at the Cultural Center Gallery in Belgrade in 1968, and at the Studio ’70 at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. He later participated also in the Studio ’75 and ’76 shows, and had a solo exhibition at Moderna galerija’s project space Mala galerija in 1974. He further showed as a guest of the Group 69 at the Presences ’76 exhibition at Moderna galerija. After that, he rarely exhibited as a painter.
In 1977, Škuc published the first album of Gatnik’s collected comic strips entitled Magna Purga – danes in nikdar več (Magna Purga – Today and Never Again), now a classic of Slovenian comics (a second, revised and updated edition came out in 1997). Gatnik’s comics, humorous parodies of cliches, were exhibited in 2004, at the first show of comics at Moderna galerija entitled Kostja Gatnik. No Peace for Magna Purga. Some were subsequently included also in the group exhibition Seven Sins in 2005. Curators Igor Zabel and Igor Španjol included Gatnik’s work also in the survey exhibition Expanded Spaces of Art: Slovenian Art 1985–1995, staged at Moderna galerija in 2004.
Kostja Gatnik received several awards for his work: a student Prešeren Award in 1969; the Golden Bird Award and the 7 Secretaries of SKOJ Award for young artists in 1974; the Levstik Award in 1983 and the Hinko Smrekar Plaques for illustrations in 1997, 2000, and 2008; and three lifetime achievement awards: the Prešeren Prize in 2010, the Levstik Prize in 2011, and the Hinko Smrekar Award in 2019.
Kostja Gatnik in RazUme, The Moderna galerija database of exhibitions (RAZ) and artists (UME) in Slovenia in the 20th and the 21st centuries.
