SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana Tobačna 001 Cultural Centre, Ljubljana, Crnuce, 09/16/2014 - 10/17/2014
ABOUT
Since the beginning of his independent artistic production after the completion of his studies in the second half of the 1990s, Miha Štrukelj has developed his painting practice in close connection with mediatized image. The artist first sourced his motifs from CT scans and ultrasound-based imaging of internal body structures, then from media-based images of dramatic or even catastrophic events and in the last decade, his primary focus has been on the scenes of urban topography. His works mostly exhibit often-ignored, destitute or less interesting parts of cities, where the artist’s main interest is in the buildings as well as their linear elements and geometric architectural forms. Each creation builds on a “realistic” image which the artist pixelates or blurs by displaying it at a lower resolution or breaking it down into the smallest units and then by transferring it on another medium with the use of painting grid. The composition grid, which is the painters’ traditional aid in transferring images from the original medium to another, remains in Štrukelj’s case deliberately revealed at all times and as such constitutes not only an essential formal but also a message-bearing element of the artwork.
The spatial arrangement of Nekje vmes [Somewhere in between] represents an imaginary landscape that combines in a drawing diverse real and fictional views of architectural forms of urban centers. Original locations are deliberately concealed by abstracting and fragmenting real data from the reference photos, and fictional elements are infiltrated in such a way as to not be perceived as foreign. The depicted cityscape embodies the ambiguous relationship between the contradictory elements real–utopian and is marked by the confrontation between the strictly rational organization of the visual plan supported with mathematical bases and the emotive flux of the hand.
With this exhibition project, Štrukelj presents himself as an artist who masterfully integrates different elements into a visual whole and conjures up an illusion of the actual architectural system by using the existing element of the gallery wall. The grid structure of the wall painting escapes from the two-dimensional medium, spreads and blends with the cord-like spatial composition. In this way the urban landscape opens into space and the viewer becomes the surrogate for a destitute urban setting.
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Since the beginning of his independent artistic production after the completion of his studies in the second half of the 1990s, Miha Štrukelj has developed his painting practice in close connection with mediatized image. The artist first sourced his motifs from CT scans and ultrasound-based imaging of internal body structures, then from media-based images of dramatic or even catastrophic events and in the last decade, his primary focus has been on the scenes of urban topography. His works mostly exhibit often-ignored, destitute or less interesting parts of cities, where the artist’s main interest is in the buildings as well as their linear elements and geometric architectural forms. Each creation builds on a “realistic” image which the artist pixelates or blurs by displaying it at a lower resolution or breaking it down into the smallest units and then by transferring it on another medium with the use of painting grid. The composition grid, which is the painters’ traditional aid in transferring images from the original medium to another, remains in Štrukelj’s case deliberately revealed at all times and as such constitutes not only an essential formal but also a message-bearing element of the artwork.
The spatial arrangement of Nekje vmes [Somewhere in between] represents an imaginary landscape that combines in a drawing diverse real and fictional views of architectural forms of urban centers. Original locations are deliberately concealed by abstracting and fragmenting real data from the reference photos, and fictional elements are infiltrated in such a way as to not be perceived as foreign. The depicted cityscape embodies the ambiguous relationship between the contradictory elements real–utopian and is marked by the confrontation between the strictly rational organization of the visual plan supported with mathematical bases and the emotive flux of the hand.
With this exhibition project, Štrukelj presents himself as an artist who masterfully integrates different elements into a visual whole and conjures up an illusion of the actual architectural system by using the existing element of the gallery wall. The grid structure of the wall painting escapes from the two-dimensional medium, spreads and blends with the cord-like spatial composition. In this way the urban landscape opens into space and the viewer becomes the surrogate for a destitute urban setting.
For More Information