Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Lojze Spacal - Boats and Nets
Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Lojze Spacal - Boats and Nets
Hailing from Trieste, Lojze Spacal (1907−2000) was a pivotal figure of the 20th century art scene, creating at the intersection of two worlds. In his extensive body of work, he established himself in Slovenia, Italy, and beyond as a subtle poet of Karst. After World War II, he played an important role of introducing Slovenian artist to current modernist trends. Following his period of intimist painting, after the war he became increasingly focused on printmaking. In the early 1950s, the artist's attention was drawn to motifs related to the littoral world. The different objects (boat, nets, house, fence, barrel, lamp) in the colour woodblock print Boats and Nets are counterposed in a way that colour and texture fill every inch of the image. The dynamic square design and the subdivision into smaller planes are reminiscent of French cubism. The print reveals the fundamental construction elements of Spacal's images: verticals, horizontals, simple line patterns, inclusion of basic shapes, such as the circle, the square, and the triangle. Over the next two decades, he radically refined these elements and started to approach them as signs. By adopting flatness, straightforwardness, and simple motifs, Spacal went beyond the established Slovenian academic frameworks and introduced the idea of artistic freedom.
