29. 8. 2025–5. 10. 2025 Series Inspiration: Foreshadowing
Series Inspiration: Foreshadowing
UGM Kabinet, Strossmayerjeva ulica 6
29 August−5 October 2025
opening: Friday, 29 August 2025, 19:00
project design and realisation: Simona Šuc
exhibition text: Andreja Borin
co-creators: Mateja Kavčič, Barbara Buttinger Förster, Helen Czerski, Borut Gombač, Ivana Petan, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Simona Šuc
The painter Simona Šuc has drawn inspiration for the current exhibition from a sketchbook. The sketchbook serves as a space for capturing creative thoughts, functioning as an intersection of thoughts, impressions, and brief notes on various matters, an unoccupied space dedicated to the initial manifestation of an abstract idea. The artist's sketchbook is a highly personal space, often concealed and hidden from public view. Although it frequently signifies the first step in the creative process, it usually remains overshadowed by the more 'significant' pieces displayed in exhibitions. However, this exhibition provides a slightly different perspective on the creative process. The sketchbook is not merely the starting point for the exhibition; it is also an exhibition space designed to function as a sketchbook in a spatial context.
Simona Šuc has invited contributors whose works might be found throughout her sketchbook, individuals whose artistic endeavours resonate with hers, and those who are integral to her creative realm, inspiring her in various ways. Within her sketchbook, you will encounter poems, excerpts from scientific literature, sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, music, etc. A notable aspect of the sketchbook is that each entry is regarded with equal importance. On a single page, a contemporary, seemingly insignificant note may coexist with a sketch that may serve as the foundation for a new series or a fresh phase of creation. In this non-hierarchical approach, the works of the invited contributors are also arranged within the exhibition. The intention is to establish connections and interactions, thereby opening a space for relations to develop.
The title of the current sketchbook is Foreshadowing. Each contributor reflects, in their own distinct manner, on the elusive dimension that is difficult to articulate and that resides alongside the physical realm of the world. It is the dimension of space and time that exists before the emergence of forms, before the physical image is manifested. How does one sense the apparent void where future phenomena are emerging? How does it pulsate? How does it sound? How does this immaterial dimension inhabit the material world? The selected artists address these and similar questions in various ways. Helen Czerski, an English physicist and oceanographer, adopts a scientific approach aimed at enhancing awareness of the oceans' role and significance, while the selected quotations are of a poetic nature, providing new perspectives for interpretation. The Austrian painter and sculptor Barbara Buttinger Förster, along with the Australian Aboriginal artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, draw from the archetypal and dreamlike realm that underlies the material image of the world. This perspective, which is (was) quite natural for primitive peoples, enables a connection with the spiritual realm, the world of ancestors and archetypes, the sacred spaces of the Earth, the creatures of nature, and the vastness of the cosmos, among others. In her creative endeavours, the painter Mateja Kavčič conveys the beauty and fragility of the natural world, particularly the plant realm, by duplicating a single tree leaf und thus interpreting the infinite variety of natural forms. Through her concentric arrangements, she reminds us of the shared origin of all that exists. Ivana Petan, a ceramicist and geomancer, creates clay sculptures that embody amorphous primordial forms, dwelling between the figural and the earthly, the shell and the mass, the spirit and the matter, as well as the handmade and the naturally occurring. "The centre of the centre is not a dot, but depth," says poet Borut Gombač in his poetry collection With the Tip of the Tip of the Tongue. In his work, he delicately and "with the tip of the tongue" tastes and articulates subtle states of the spirit and the world, whether they are freshly emerging or gradually fading away, existing on the threshold between the visible and the perceptible, between here and there, not fully here and not entirely there. The exhibition also includes two paintings by Simona Šuc, which convey spiritual representations of landscapes as perceived and felt through the inner eye. The painter has generously opened her sketchbook for the viewers, transposing it into space and weaving subtle connections that unite the displayed works into a coherent and inspiring whole.
