Artwork to go / Živko Marušič - Dreams
Artwork to go / Živko Marušič - Dreams
100+ Highlights from the UGM Collection
Every week, take the "artwork to go" from our gallery, which you can also get to know through the audio description here or the video here. As the seventh artwork to go, we present Dreams by the artist Živko Marušič.
Živko Marušič, one of the leading representatives of new image painting in Slovenia, focuses on figures in his work. Marušič finds them in his dreams, at play, as fantasy, while his pictorial language is dominated by a relaxed colour spectrum. Often a daring, top-down view is employed, with the figures depicted in cropped perspective and striking unusual poses.
In Dreams a boy on stilts, one of the artist’s favourite motifs, is depicted. The boy’s body is bent backwards and his torso cropped, reminiscent of the work of Andrea Mantegna. The background is planar, consisting of a red upper section and a predominantly black plane below it. The black area between the stilts is animated by bold strokes of colour. The Euclidean space seems to be receding, disappearing, which reinforces the impression of an unreal, dream-like world where a different understanding of distance and proportion might be at work. The narrow vertical format of the painting that significantly narrows the gaze creates the impression that a door leading to a world different from the one we know has been left slightly ajar. Similarly, the zipper sewn into the lower part of the painting reminding us that the work is handmade could be understood as a border between the world of the viewer and the world hidden beyond the painting, which in turn conceals, perhaps reveals an array of unimagined possibilities. The narrow format of the painting also has a highly pragmatic dimension: it enabled the artist to carry the painting in his bag across the border to his gallerist in neighbouring Italy.
