Bogdan Borčić & Gustav Gnamuš: In Dialogue

XVII. Exhibition in the Graphic Cabinet of Bogdan Borčić

This year’s installation continues the series of dialogues between the artworks created by Bogdan Borčić’s and those created by other artists that we started last year, and this time it confronts the works created by Bogdan Borčić with those created by Gustav Gnamuš, both of whom are considered important Slovenian postmodern painters. Their life paths often intermingled, as they were colleagues at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana as well as close friends. Another thing they share is that they both received Prešeren’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

The story built as a dialogue between their works is set in the 1980s, when the creative expressions of the two artists came closer to each other. At the beginning of the 1980s, Borčić returned to painting after a fertile decade of creating shell motifs in graphic prints. In the same period, Gnamuš abandoned the use of sprays, with which he used to create his large-format paintings, and returned to creating paintings with a personal touch – the touch of a brush stroke on canvas or paper of smaller dimensions. During this period, Borčić turned to the tradition of American abstract expressionism and minimalism, which Gnamuš had been developing in his poetics a few years earlier. Their works thus echo and reference the painting practices and ideas of artists working in colour field painting such as Barnett Newman, Clifford Still and Mark Rothko.

Turning away from depicting the visible, external and object world focused the attention of both artists on the exploration of the pictorial field. The installation opens with Gnamuš’s pencil- graphite drawings in the frottage technique and Borčić’s graphics and pastels, where various shades of grey transition into a colour palette of brown-orange shades. The similarity of artistic expressions is visible in the construction of brightness and darkness in the interweaving of narrower and wider strips of colour layers, which are superimposed on each other in dashed geometric shapes.

Some of the works in the exhibition were not created in the 1980s, however, they reveal a connection between Borčić and Gnamuš. In the oeuvre of both artists, small-format paintings in the acrylic on canvas technique, created around the turn of the millennium, stand out. They are united by the use of the same contrasts of black and blue and the fact that, according to the art historian Nadja Gnamuš, PhD, Borčić was exceptionally fond of her father’s painting. On several occasions, Borčić paid tribute to other artists who were close to him in one way or another (Approaching Rothko, Hommage to Stupica, …). This year’s installation is thus rounded off by a large canvas from 2002, kept by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, entitled Gustav’s Easel, hommage to Gnamuš, which testifies to the sincere creative and friendly

Curator: Kristina T. Simončič