Ana Vrtačnik: Mere Touch Effect

Everything we touch touches us back. Art usually »touches« us on an emotional level. However, by challenging traditional museum conventions of »no touching«, Ana Vrtačnik’s exhibition Mere Touch Effect in the Lapidarium of Galerija Božidar Jakac raises questions about the bodily experience and allows direct contact with the artworks.

Painter Ana Vrtačnik pursued her doctoral studies during the COVID pandemic, a time when art was experienced only through screens, and the dependence on them spread to all other areas of life. In resistance to “art at a distance” and the general taboo of touch, she developed her tactile painting, which calls for contact through evocative forms and the choice of a pleasant material – felt. In the exhibition, she presents herself with soft but compact woollen objects that grow out of the uneven walls and together form their own ecosystem.

Her biomimetic paintings invite us to get to know the artwork not only visually, but also through touch, which has been crucial throughout the entire creative process. From gathering, washing, combing and drying the wool, through dry and wet felting, to modelling the ups and downs of imagined landscapes, building islands and creating maps. The wool configurations trace the relations of textures in nature, their interweaving, knotting, grouping, undulating and circling. Despite their apparent chaos, they are nevertheless subject to an order beyond human understanding.

Curator: Deja Bečaj

Ana Vrtačnik was born in 1991 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She completed her MA and PhD in painting at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, where she has been working since 2017 at the Department of Painting. She has also studied at the Salzburg Academy and had a residency at the Red Gate gallery in Beijing. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, collaborations and publications with various artists, curators, institutions and galleries around the world (China, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, United States, Canada, Spain…). She has won several awards in the field of art, the most important of which are: The “Little Prince” Foundation Award, the “Milivoj Nikolajević” Foundation Award and the University of Novi Sad Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Art.