Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Rudolf Saksida - A Cat
Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Rudolf Saksida - A Cat
Rudolf Saksida (1913–1984) successfully applied his artistic creativity to pedagogy, painting, illustration, poster art, even in film in as many as three centres of the border region: Koper, Trieste and Gorica. It is commonly held that in the 1950s, Slovenian artists living across the border (Spacal, Černigoj, Cesar and Sirk) introduced features such as a brighter colour spectrum, clear compositions and a certain lighter Mediterranean temperament into mainstream Slovenian painting. Saksida combined these elements to form his own, personal version of simplification, derived directly from the Italian Avant-Garde together with his intensive search for artistic originality that often included a sense of humour and the imaginary. In this work Saksida linked “primitivism” in expression with primitivism in politics, and created one of the few examples of political satire in painting. During his work on this painting Saksida was living in Trieste, which became a central venue for confrontations between the opposing political aspirations and arbitrary actions of both the left and the right wings. The nasty, aggressive pose of an otherwise simple, stylised figure of a black cat is seen in just such a context. The humanised facial features serve to suggest that behind any dark disposition always stands an individual.
