EX-TEMPORE PIRAN 2025 – 60TH INTERNATIONAL PAINTING EX-TEMPORE
Ex-tempore Piran 2025 is in full swing during the first week of September. After the opening of the exhibition Imaginary of Details by last year’s Young Author Prize recipient (2024), Lev Ambrož Okorn, at the Herman Pečarič Gallery, stamping of supports began on Saturday, 30 August 2025, at various locations across Slovenia and Croatia. Throughout the week until 6 September 2025, various accompanying events for children and adults will take placein Piran, organized by Piran Coastal Galleries in cooperation with various partners. We would like to draw the visitors’ attention to a special event: The Room: Conversations About Ex-tempore Piran, which will take place on Thursday, 4 September, 2025, at 7 p.m. at the Herman Pečarič Gallery in Piran. The participating guests will be: mag. Vid Lenard, art historian and art critic, and Dejan Mehmedovič, art critic and head of the Insula Gallery. The conversation will be guided by the PCG’s curator dr. Tina Jazbec.
Ex-tempore Piran 2025 will conclude on Saturday, 6 September 2025, with an award ceremony at 8:30 PM on Tartini Square, accompanied by a music program: the director of the ceremony is Igor Jelen — Iggy, while performances will be given by renowned tenor Žiga Lakner and cellist Bernardo Brizani. The event will be hosted by Iztok Gustinčič. This will be followed by the opening of the exhibition of awarded works at the Piran Civic Gallery and a celebratory gathering in front of the gallery.
FORMA VIVA PORTOROŽ 2025
The program of Piran Coastal Galleries in the autumn season also includes the traditional biennial sculpture symposium Forma Viva Portorož. This year’s edition, taking place from 15 September to 10 October, presents a unique story of two artists: Aldo Calò (1910–1983), a renowned Italian sculptor who participated in the symposium in 1963, and his grandnephew Giorgio Andreotta Calò, one of the most important contemporary Italian artists.
The artistic project titled A Calò establishes a sculptural and personal dialogue with the past. The project curator is Mara Ambrožič Verderber, director of the Piran Coastal Galleries. The gesture of the project is based on the idea of re-materializing a “copy” of a lost sculpture from the Squarcio series (Eng. Crack), which Aldo created at the 1963 symposium. Due to a land dispute, the piece remained on private property, formerly part of the public sculpture park in Seča. Giorgio Andreotta Calò now returns to preserved sketches, photographs, and documentation held in the archive of Piran Coastal Galleries and proposes to reconstruct the sculpture in Istrian stone.
Calò will be assisted on-site by renowned Austrian sculptor Max Seibald, one of Europe’s foremost experts on Istrian stone. Seibald created his sculpture for Forma Viva in 2021 and now returns as a master sculptor passing on his knowledge to a new generation of artists. This year, the worksite will be led by sculptor Ištvan Išt Huzjan from Slovenia, who previously created a sculpture for the Memorial Park in Ankaran as part of Forma Viva.
The symposium will include a rich accompanying program: workshops for all age groups, discussions and meetings with the local community, a roundtable for citizens and professionals, and open worksite visits for Slovenian and international art critics and curators.
Professional gatherings and public roundtables will be led by PCG’ Director Mara Ambrožič Verderber and curator Matic Bukovac. Workshops for children, led by Ištvan Išt Huzjan, will be coordinated by curator-pedagogue Ana Papež. Every Saturday at the sculpture worksite, external collaborator Dragan Klarica will again organize free culinary workshops and meetings of locals and local cultural associations with the artists and curators.
CONVERSATION AT THE MEDUZA GALLERY EXHIBITION
A public discussion is part of the accompanying program of the exhibition by Vesna Bukovec and Ana Čigon Work in Progress. Deceptive Working Time. It will take place on Tuesday, 9 September 2025, at 6 PM at the Meduza Gallery in Koper. The exhibition is part of a multi-year artistic-curatorial research project that critically addresses precarious labor and modern forms of neoliberal exploitation of people, nature, and the planet. It also explores alternative ways of organizing society that do not surrender to hopelessness or the belief that nothing can change.
The setup is based on reflections from several contributors and three books: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber, The Restoration of Capitalism: The Repatriarchalization of Society by Lilijana Burcar, and the anthology Degrowth: A Vocabulary For a New Era.
The exhibition’s authors invited social economy ambassador and activist Jadranka Vesel (Research Institute for Social Economy – RISE) to moderate the discussion. She is also a project contributor and one of the interviewees in the exhibition video. She will talk to Dr. Karolina Babič, researcher of social and solidarity economies at the Faculty of Education, University of Primorska, and Dr. Blaž Kosovel, editor of Razpotja magazine and author of the foreword to the Slovenian edition of Bullshit Jobs.
ANDREJ ŠKUFCA’S PROJECT MOVES TO RAVNIKAR GALLERY IN LJUBLJANA
The highly visited exhibition by Andrej Škufca, which explores infrastructural aspects of global techno-ecology, ended at Monfort Gallery in Portorož at the end of August. As part of this special international co-production, PCG partnered with related centers for visual art in Slovenia and Europe (Projekt Atol Institute, Ljubljana; MG+MSUM, Ljubljana; New Jörg Gallery, Vienna; Ravnikar Gallery, Ljubljana; Kucca, Zagreb). The first “stage” in 2025 will open at Ravnikar Gallery in Ljubljana, with the opening on 3 September 2025, at 6 PM.
More at the link: Gallery SI — RAVNIKAR Projects.
You are kindly invited to join us!
