Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Anka Krašna - At the Trough
Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Anka Krašna - At the Trough
After a short period in which she followed the masters of art informel, Anka Krašna, a professor at Faculty of Education at Maribor University, committed herself to a form of engaged, figurative art. During the 1980s, which proved a pivotal time for the painter, the asceticism of high modernism was being drowned out by the accentuated sensibilities and artistic subjectivism of the New Image painting. Krašna discovered her credo in the symbolism of the figure, in the intense contrasts of colour, and a varied structuring of the painting surface. At the Trough is a rather large canvas, which the painter created at a time when expressive figurative art typical for the early years of postmodernism was already fading – and at a time the artist returned to a quieter, more personal means of expression. The bulky, glowing-red pigs’ bodies create an aggressive diagonal line that is interrupted by a white plane of newspaper collage. Here we are undeniable witnesses to the same jostling at the trough that lent the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm the power it did. This Orwellian depiction concludes the artist's most distinct series of personified animals. And yet we continue to see similar imagery at work, occasionally, throughout the remainder of Krašna's oeuvre.
