Photo: Matija Pavlovec, Moderna galerija
IN MEMORIAM | SERGEJ KAPUS (1950–2023)
Sergej Kapus, the painter, art theorist, poet and lecturer, has left us.
Between 1992 and 2005, Sergej Kapus taught modern art at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ljubljana, and from 2005 on at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was appointed Associate Professor in 2010. He was an art historian who sought, uniting his many talents, the “symbol” of or “key” to the world, as Igor Zabel wrote on the occasion of Kapus’s exhibition at the Equrna Gallery in 1994.
He began exhibiting his art in the early 1980s: he was part of the Tivoli Group, a member of the work collective Equrna in Ljubljana, and he participated in ambitiously conceived pan-Yugoslav exhibitions (e.g., the Yu Dokumenta exhibition in Sarajevo in 1987 and 1989). In 1987, the Littoral Galleries Piran staged an overview of his work since 1973.
Moderna galerija showed Kapus’s work as part of the show Moderna galerija’s New Acquisitions 1983–1986 in 1987, and before that at the traveling exhibition Young Slovenian Art (Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade in 1984, followed by Sarajevo and Ljubljana in 1985). His works have been included in Moderna galerija’s permanent exhibitions since 1990, and he was a member of the team of curators when the latest such exhibition, 20th Century. Continuities and Ruptures, was curated in 2011. He had solo exhibitions at Moderna galerija’s former project space Mala galerija in 1989 and 2007, and a survey exhibition at Moderna galerija in 2002, with the texts for that catalogue written by his friends, the poets Jure Detela and Dane Zajc, and curator Igor Zabel.
In 1991, Kapus was invited to stage an exhibition at Moderna galerija as an art critic and theorist: a survey of modernist art in Slovenia in the 1970s entitled Image and Matter. He also contributed to and was on the board of editors of M’ARS, an art journal published by Moderna galerija between 1989 and 2001. In 1998, Moderna galerija published his study on the painter Jožef Petkovšek, Ugrabljeni slikar (Misappropriated Painter), a book that brought many new views and insights, thanks both to the author’s chosen methodology and the selected material. In 2019, Moderna galerija published another book by Kapus, Futur Anterieur. A number of his texts have also been reprinted in the anthologies published to coincide with the major survey exhibitions of Slovenian art between 1975 and 1985 (To the Edge and Beyond) and 1985 and 1995 (Expanded Spaces of Art, 2005). His essays have also appeared in several catalogues of the retrospectives of Slovenian modernist painters staged at Moderna galerija (Tugo Šušnik, Gabrijel Stupica, Andraž Šalamun).
Kapus’s body of writings is quite extensive and still awaits a thorough study. Among other texts it includes articles published in the student newspaper Tribuna, the Časopis za kritiko znanosti journal, and his contribution to “Podoba kristal” (1988), a special issue of the journal Problemi dedicated to his generation.
In 20019, Sergej Kapus received the Ivana Kobilca Award “for a consistent oeuvre of paintings and an analytical approach to the pictorial field that opens up temporal and spatial paradoxes, affirming the enigmatic character of visuality. Over the past four decades, he has crucially marked Slovenian art with his work both as a painter and theorist.” In 2020, he received the Rihard Jakopič Award for lifetime achievement.
