Zora Plešnar
Zora Plešnar
The Pilon Gallery, Prešernova 3, Ajdovščina
26 March – 2 May 2021
curator: Andreja Borin, Umetnostna galerija Maribor
The Pilon Gallery presents an exhibition by the photographer Zora Plešnar (b. 1925 - 2021), prepared by the Maribor Art Gallery. Zora Plešnar was the most prominent Slovenian photographer of the 1970s and 1980s. Her artistic path began when she joined the Maribor Photo Club, which was one of the most successful photo clubs in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s. Two years later - as the only woman - she participated in the groundbreaking exhibition of the photography group Mariborski krog, which strived for avant-garde modernism and introduced a number of innovations in both technical and expressive terms. In the environment of excellent photographers of the Photo Club (Ivan Dvoršak, Zmago Jeraj, Janko Jelnikar, Branimir Jerneić, Stojan Kerbler), Zora Plešnar established a sovereign authorial expression with her first cycle Mimo. In three decades of photographing, she has enriched Slovenian photography with excellent black-and-white cycles: Mimo, Nad oblaki, Odsevi, Praznovanje, Terelž and Rojstvo mesta / New Belgrade. In her work, she focused mostly on landscapes (including urban ones) and portraits. Her photographic images of landscapes are often elevated to the surreal, the apparent, the imaginary, the dreamlike. The real here and now of its reflections, clouds, hills, or city in the making is universal and timeless, in touch with a dream dimension that passes freely between the external image and the internal experience. At the same time, she constantly devoted herself to portraits, where her warm, communicative nature and affection for children were fully expressed. The cycle Childhood, with its immediacy and authenticity, thus indisputably represents the pinnacle of her portrait photography.
Around fifty original photographs by Zora Plešnar from the collection of the Maribor Art Gallery are on display.
