Bogdan Borčić: Studio

8th Exhibition in the Graphic Cabinet of Bogdan Borčić 

Among all the branches of art, the definition of the space in fine art has a specific and multifaceted significance. Usually we speak of the fine art space on the painted surface, but in this essay the focus will be on a particular space – the space of the artist’s studio. There are a number of famous depictions by painters of their studio space which today represent milestones in the history of fine art, and we know of numerous cycles of photographs of artists in their studios (in Slovenia one of the most famous photographers of such a cycle is without doubt Tihomir Pinter, whose photographs of a number of painters are kept in the fund of this gallery, and for this exhibition we present the photograph of Bogdan Borčić in his studio), and we are also familiar with a fair number of essays on this topic, of which one of the most original is certainly Brian O’Doherty’s essay Studio and Cube – On the relationship between where art is made and where art is displayed. O’Doherty stresses four major stations in European art where the studio takes on a manifest role. These are Jan van Eyck: The Arnolfini Wedding (1424), owing to the convex mirror in the middle of the painting, which reflects the entire space and where we also see a depiction of the artist himself. Related to this is the Diego Velasquez painting Las Meninas, (1656), where the viewer’s gaze is an important part of the work, and the next is Johannes Vermeer’s Allegory of Painting (ca. 1667), in which the curtains open and shroud our view, while the fourth such prominent work is Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio (1855).

Curator: Goran Milovanović
Photo: Matej Jordan