06 Jul 2009

International Centre of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana) presents Gabrijel Stupica, Resistance

The exhibition is organised by the International Centre of Graphic Arts from Ljubljana, the Organising Committee for Commemorating 11 July 1995 on the 14th Anniversary of the Genocide against Bosniacs in the 'UN Safe Area' of Srebrenica and the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

The exhibition is part of the programme that commemorates 11 July 1995, on the 14th anniversary of the genocide against Bosniacs in the 'UN safe area' of Srebrenica, and the burial of the identified victims.

Gabrijel Stupica (1913 – 1990) was one of the giants of twentieth-century Slovene art. He helped to shape the country's artistic identity both as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he taught several generations of artists, and through his artwork, which in the 1950s and 1960s displayed the Western-oriented style of figural existential intimism.

The publication of the series 'Ljubljana in the Underground', which appeared in four magnificent volumes between 1959 and 1970, brought together reminiscences and scholarly studies, historical documents and artistic responses inspired by the resistance during the Second World War. With great sensitivity, Lojze Gostiša, as he started designing the books, solicited illustrations from the best Slovene artists, including Gabrijel Stupica. The first book came out in 1959, followed in 1961 by the second, but Stupica, who undertook every task with the utmost thoroughness, had still not completed his illustrations. It was only after the second book had appeared that he gave Gostiša, as a gift, a portfolio of twelve gouaches (Gostiša sets their date of origin at 1962). These are the works we present here under the (added) title 'Resistance'.

Stupica's drawings in the 'Resistance' series are in many ways a continuation of his triptych sketch for the People's Assembly of the People's Republic of Slovenia (today's Parliament). In 1957, Gabrijel Stupica was one of a group of Slovenia's finest artists who were asked to adorn the interior of the new building. He proposed a monumental triptych on the subject of resistance and oppression, illustrated by a central image of protesters that would be flanked by two pictures of market women. The committee rejected the proposal on the grounds that it did not show the reality of the age and that it was too modern.

The first thing that surprises us about these works is their dark color scheme, which seems like a return to the almost monochrome browns and blues of the large paintings from the first half of the 1950s – especially because in the paintings he was now making, Stupica was devoting himself entirely to exploring the problem of white on white. But if Stupica was a skeptical painter, he was also an ambiguous one. In his work, oppositions do not exclude, but complement each other: whenever he was dealing with whiteness in his large-format works, he would compensate for this in his sketches by using dark colors, and vice versa.

The 1950s were a critical time for Slovene art. In opposition to the poster-style mode of socialist-realist painting, Gabrijel Stupica developed a more noble chiaroscuro based on the Baroque, which in itself pointed to the fact that things did not have clear-cut meanings in life but were contradictory and complementary. Thus the artist showed the strength of his creativity and the independent path he was taking, resolutely, without looking over his shoulder at political, ideological, aesthetic, moral, or any other sort of pressures; as a result, he very soon won the respect of the critics, his fellow artists, and art lovers. The particular feeling in his works, which was so unlike that of socialist realism, demonstrated that at a time when many artists, whether because of hardship, opportunism, fervent conviction or something else, were portraying subjects from the recently ended war and the resistance, Gabrijel Stupica would not submit to the aesthetic that was imposed on art by politics and ideology.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in Slovene and English, edited and designed by Lojze Gostiša. Author of the catalogue essay is Slovenian art historian and curator Jure Mikuž.