Fleeting Atmospheres
Nina Čelhar, Fleeting Atmospheres
UGM Studio, Trg Leona Štuklja 2, Maribor
opening: Friday, 5 June 2015, at 19.00
An hour before the exhibition opening, at 18:00, a guided tour will take place in the form of a discussion between the artist and author of the exhibition Nina Čelhar and the curator Andreja Borin. You are kindly invited!
Nina Čelhar is a painter of the youngest generation who remains faithful to traditional painting involving canvas, colour, and brush. She is interested in the phenomenon of observation, the transfer of the inner experience to the canvas, the subjectivity of this transfer and the intimate dialogue between the visible and mediated involving the spectator.
Her works derive from the motifs of the modern world and are fuelled by the painter's inner world. Shortly after completing her studies, she formed a sovereign painting language marked by a limited range of colours and restrained poetics, as well as the iconography of a modern single-family home in terms of content. Painting is a deeply intimate experience for this young painter, which she enters through several prior phases, starting with listening to her inner sensual and mental states.
Nina Čelhar is fully dedicated to every single phase in the emerging process of her works as each phase is significant to her. Painting resembles construction that demands all her focus and patience. In order to reach the desired effect, she thoroughly combines various techniques and to achieve immediacy does not use previously designed sketches. Her works are composed of only few elements, most frequently of a geometrically designed single-family house (as an interior at first and exterior later) placed in a certain relationship to its surrounding environment. The house as a personal portrait of the painter (as stated by Petja Grafenauer) is apprehended through the proportions of full and empty surfaces, construction textures, colour harmonies, and particularly through the natural vegetation in relation to the construction. If the geometrically designed architecture represents certain stability and might be compared to the skeleton of reason, then nature is depicted sketchily employing confident, broad strokes that would resemble the vitality of the painter's inner source.
The works of Nina Čelhar demand a sensible spectator who is able to be still. The open meaning of the works allows diverse experience and apprehension and, by all means, the painter's outstanding artistic sensibility offers great delight to a visually sensitive eye.
Nina Čelhar (born 1990 in Postojna, Slovenia) graduated from the Secondary School of the Arts in Nova Gorica, after she enrolled at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) where she graduated in painting in 2012. She continued the post-graduate studies at the same academy and spent the year 2013/2014 as an exchange student at the Hochschule für Grafik and Buchkunst in Leipzig (Germany). In 2012, she received the ALUO Award for Special Achievements and in 2015 joined the top ten finalists for the prestigious ESSL Art Award.
YOU ARE KINDLY INVITED!
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