Ivo Prančič

Parathymia

4. 11. 2021 - 10. 12. 2021

Ivo Prančič

Parathymia

4. 11. 2021 - 10. 12. 2021

Ivo Prančič's exhibition is an excellent choice for opening of the gallery, because it is about an artist whose oeuvre represents the consolidation of all various painting procedures that marked Non-mimetic art, the greatest contribution of 20th century to the visual culture. I perceive his creative credo as the ability to internalise all the diversity that represented the current state or even the history of modern painting at the time of his artistic formation, as well as everything that happened in the meantime, and return it to the world as his own content and form.

It's hard to resist and at least try to itemise everything that can be noted in his paintings as a thoughtful echo: from expressive gestural painting, monochrome, Informel, colour field painting, hard-edge, geometric abstraction, Malevichesque black squares on black field, Opalka's textual strings, Letterism in general , the expressiveness of the New Image and the New Wild, and so on.

Prančič is one of the generation of artists that had to carry the burden of painting vocation through the decades of the proclaimed death of painting as medium at the turn of the millennium or today's oblivion of abstract painting, while becoming successful and remaining relevant. He did it. It is especially effective, but also indicative of his subversively comprehensive creative strategy, his manner of executing paintings on extremely deep mountings, additionally propped on massive retracted supports.

Thanks to this structure, after the painting is placed on the wall, it seems to be floating in the space, which at the same time highlights its essential spiritual provenance and emphasizes its qualification as an art object. Indeed, Prančič's paintings that protrude into the space are paintings-objects, another of the readily used methods of contamination of artistic disciplines by which the Eighties’ art production marked the end of the avant-garde project and the affirmation of traditional artistic disciplines aimed at creating of objects of art.

In the end, I hope that I have presented enough arguments to confirm the unusual art of synthesis as expressed by Ivo Prančič in his oeuvre as an ideal painting paradigm of our time and therefore a sufficient guarantor of the future of the Bažato Gallery and its open program. In our societies there can never be too much synergy between the public cultural system and private entrepreneurship in culture as a return to the cultural matrix of modern civil society uninterrupted by the combination of wars and revolutions that we have experienced.

Branko Franceschi
Excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition Parathymia, published in the printed edition of the exhibition catalogue.

Ivo Prančič

He was born on the 2nd of June 1955 in Ljubljana. He studied painting at the University of Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts (ALU) under professor Gustav Gnamuš, where he graduated in 1982 and also completed his postgraduate studies in 1984.

He went on numerous study trips. In addition to solo presentations in all major galleries in Slovenia, he is a regular guest of the exhibition spaces of Austria, especially in the Carinthia region. He also exhibited in Croatia and Montenegro and in group exhibitions in France and China, and also at the Zala Gallery and at the Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana. In 1990, he travelled through Italy with a scholarship from the Moša Pijade Fund. He spent several months in Paris, in 1991 and 1999 as an artist in residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, and in 1993 with a scholarship from the French government.

As a freelance artist, he works and lives in Ljubljana.

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