Lara Papov: Parallax |
Herman Pečarič Gallery, Piran |
28th of August – 31st of October 2021
Lara Papov presents her solo show Parallax, where she displays her spatial, conceptual, and socially engaged research through the chosen media. She recently graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts, and her artworks and installations focus on the “intermediate space and its volatile materialization, which unfolds through the daily processes of mutation and adjustment“, a concept that defines the title of the current exhibition.
This is also the main theme of her first solo exhibition in the littoral, hosted by the Herman Pečarič Gallery of Piran, a recognition obtained as the winner of the prize reserved to the best artist younger than 35, granted by the international jury of experts of the 55th edition of Ex-tempore Piran, the most important art contest of Slovene Istria.
The jury awarded her painting Best Content with the following argument: “The artwork stands out for its interesting conceptual direction, in which she combines the found object technique with the poetic image of the sea, resulting in emotional and evocative content, highlighted by its repetitiveness. The sea landscape is thus modernised, related to the mass consumptions and actualized”.
The artworks of Lara are art installations and videos; they differ for technique and themes, but share their simple and minimal essence, moving towards spontaneous and playful merriment, and connected through their visual attractiveness. The author cunningly displays her works in the space of the gallery, creating a special and characteristic exhibition, in which the spectator can move around and explore the surrounding space, reinterpreting it through his personal background and giving life to a private and exclusive artistic experience. The peculiarities of her ideologic message and her artistic projects are immediately perceivable, and the artist questions her own existence through her sensitivity, inquiring the limbo of the intermediate space that most people take for granted.
Lara Papov’s artworks take us by surprise through the use of details taken from the everyday world and easily recognizable, part of that irrelevant information we constantly are exposed to, which in her art become power symbols and centres of significance. Lara tries to solicit human reaction to little things, investigating the first impression created by their physical appearance, and what is concealed behind this aesthetic experience. We live in a world where technologies have reached an unthinkable point of development, enabling a hyperproduction of images and visual information thrown aggressively to the masses, precluding people to fully realize and comprehend what they are seeing.
Most of these messages, in whatever form they are diffused, get lost and forgotten, and only little fragments are retained by our consciences, no matter how relevant they are. However, these fragments are always connected with an extremely private perspective, resulting from the combination of personal experiences, memories, and mental associations, thus creating into the human conscience an entirely new and intimate reality.
This is also the path followed by the author, who transfers decorative elements and subjectively reprocessed information through her artistic process, transforming them into new massages which unfold in her communication with the outside world.
Lara Papov’s art is multifarious: she employs different kinds of techniques and tools and is open to unconventional materials and advanced technologies (as 3D printing). Her projects emphasise the relationship between the artwork and the space surrounding it, as to better adapt to the message she wants to convey, and open towards new kinds of interpretation, resulting from the mental process, the emotional response, and the cultural background each visitor bring with him.
Nives Marvin
Biography
Lara Papov studied at the Academy of Visual Arts (AVA) of Ljubljana. She held numerous solo shows in Slovenia and participated in several collective exhibitions abroad. This year, she took part in the group project Akademski oreščki #1. Leave Group? In Ljubljana. Her last solo show When You See Me Again It Won't Be Me was part of the international festival KAOS, held in Kranj in 2020, which inspired the international project About Tomorrow.
Last year, she displayed her work at the P74 Gallery of Ljubljana, in a solo show called S T A C C A T O. The art curator Danica D. Tepeš, in collaboration with the ERGO SUM institute, invited her to participate in the international exhibition Between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, held in Kiribati in 2019.
She took part in the collective exhibition S01E01 Gallerije 7: 069 in Velenje.
In collaboration with the artist Gregor Rozman, she was selected in 2016 by the City Museum of Ljubljana for the project BUS STOP, presented in the context of the Indigo Festival of Ljubljana. They also exhibited their work together, with a series of photographs, at the Tivoli Park of Ljubljana, for the project Drevo (tree), organized by the City Museum of Ljubljana.
International juries selected her artworks multiple times (in 2017, 2018, and 2020) for Ex-tempore Piran, an important art contest organized each year by the Piran Coastal Galleries; in 2020, the jury assigned her the award for the best young author, reserved for contributors younger than 35.
Lara Papov lives and works between Kranj, Ljubljana, and Koper.
