Portrait conventions, developed through centuries, are
today accessible to artists as a repertory of communication strategies that
pervade our space and time. In his series of portraits of contemporary
Slovenian artists Uroš Abram presents their images as collective creations,
results of a precisely defined dialogical method. They reveal a new ethos of
the contemporary “artist” who has left the studio as his sanctified place of
creation in order to retrieve the social responsibility for artistic production
and the lustre to the art’s dimming halo.
Owing to a particular sort of
cooperation of the portraitist and his model, Abram's dialogical portraits are
a sort of portraits parlants, speaking portraits, which reach beyond the established
portrait genres. The latter are at hand for combination and manipulation
towards capturing the essence of the model's existence in the individual and
public sense. The pictures tell us what and who the artists of today are in the
aftermath of postmodernism which has so drastically corroded the notion of the
high art that artists started to shed the established image of a creative mind
as a social subject – the inspired benefactor of mankind, offering himself/herself
regardless of sacrifices for values that surpass himself/herself and his/her
existence; they want to redefine the image of the Artist, isolated from the
rest of the world within the walls of his/her studio, where he/she pursues a
research on images of timeless truths.
The condition of neoliberal capitalism
forces contemporary artists to confront life by fighting for their existence in
the overheated situation of ruthless exploitation, social marginalization as
well as material and intellectual deprivation. In the imminent loss of the
position of Art as the privileged social activity and its drop on the scale of
social values the artist has no choice but to fight for the total refashioning
of society. Thus art and life merge as intensely as ever because they are
motivated by common goals. Uroš Abram documents this chaotic process of
remaking the basic conditions of the artistic creation today through the images
of its protagonists.
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Exhibition anouncment
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National Gallery
and Božidar Jakac Art Museum in collaboration with Galerija Fotografija
Author of the exhibition
Uroš Abram
Coordination
Andrej Smrekar
Project was supported by
Mladina
VODATEH
Ministrstvo za kulturo Republike Slovenije
Flowers
Cvetličarna Galerija Marjan Lovšin
Official wine of exhibition openings
Radgonske gorice d.d.
15. March–21. May 2017
National Gallery of Slovenia
Prešernova 24
1000 Ljubljana