Lojze Logar: Intermezzozoik, Sarcophag (U.S) |
Retrospective 1968-2014 |
Loža Gallery, Koper |
Civic Gallery, Piran |
5th of March 2021 – 25th of April 2021
Piran Coastal Galleries has been following Lojze Logar since 1968, and we exhibited his work in various solo shows and group exhibitions. For the last few years, he lived and worked in Izola, where he also died. At the Piran Civic Gallery and at the Loža Gallery of Koper, we present a selection of works from the last two painting cycles, which he has not exhibited yet in Slovenian Istria.
During the 90s, he created a cycle of paintings named Intermezzozoic, their content being related to the expiring millennium, in anticipation of the new. They were referred to the author’s desire of retreating into a refined abstract expression, highlighted by the usage of monochrome tones, turquoise and purple. The acrylics from the Sarcophag (US) cycle, created after 2001, were partially inspired by contemporary political and social events in the US, but bear also the symbolic expression connected with its Greek etymology (eating meat) and the function of the sarcophagus. He added other shades of colour to these geometrically designed compositions and interpreted the global situation of the period in his own way. The exhibition is part of the Retrospective 1968−2014, presented in four Slovenian galleries: the Carinthian Gallery of Fine Artists Slovenj Gradec, the Murska Sobota Gallery, the ZDSLU Ljubljana Gallery and the Piran Coastal Galleries.
Lojze Logar (1944, Mežica – 2014, Izola), a long-time professor of graphics, drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Ljubljana, was one of the most interesting and original authors to appear on the Slovenian art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of the last century, during the pop art period. He was born in Carinthia, spent his youth in Prekmurje, matured in Ljubljana, and last lived and died in Izola. Therefore, four institutions from the mentioned regions came together in the project of a comprehensive exhibition of the entire artist's oeuvre. Each of the exhibitions represents one separate creative stage, and they are united in their entirety by an exhibition catalogue and a joint promotional program.
Logar was the central figure among the artists who took part to the Slovene version of pop art, called new figuralics (now on view at KGLU Slovenj Gradec). He later also experimented with conceptualism and a radical colourful expressionism, then in the early 1980s he almost completely abandoned new figuralics and began to explore the artistic tendencies of minimalism, such as black-on-black painting. At the end of the 1980s, he set up his most extensive art cycle, David's Gardens (on display at the Murska Sobota Gallery), and in the 1990s he began to develop the Intermezzozoik painting cycle with a new stylistic approach, which he perfected in a series entitled Sarcophag (US). The presentation of his opus concludes in the ZDSLU Gallery in Ljubljana with the presentation of the last works on paper from the Angels series, at the Carinthian Gallery of Fine Artists Slovenj Gradec.
