Opening of the Exhibition Ana Vrtačnik: Mere Touch Effect

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 mimic the relations of textures in plants and fungi, their interweaving, knotting, grouping, undulating and circling. Despite their apparent chaos, they are nevertheless subject to laws of nature.

Exhibition is on view untill 29 June 2025.

Curator: Deja Bečaj
Photo: Jaka Babnik, GBJ Archive