Mateja Kavčič: Plant Portraits

Mateja Kavčič: Plant Portraits

Portraits are a genre familiar to everyone. Usually, portraits depict people, but in her series Plant Portraits, Mateja Kavčič has personified plant leaves using a precise, realistic painting technique. In doing so, she seeks to draw attention to the fact that every part of nature, no matter how small, is worthy of our attention.

She presses the leaves she collects on her walks between sheets of paper at home and later paints them on round canvases after observing them. This gave her the idea to paint each selected leaf individually and frame them as portraits. She paints them on paper and writes a title or explanation under each one, noting where and when she found it and when she painted it (e.g., Portrait of a Fern Leaf, Gorajte, Škofja Loka, 2012, M.K., 2013). She is constantly adding to her collection of plant portraits.
Some of the plant portraits available in the UGM shop are visual representations of Saša Pavček's poetry collection Zastali čas (Mladinska knjiga, 2021).

Dimensions: 15,5 x 21,5 cm
Technique: giclée art print / (original: pigment and acrylic emulsion on paper)
Price: 35 €

Mateja Kavčič, born in 1970 in Novo mesto, spent her childhood in Brestanica. After graduating from secondary school for design and photography, she enrolled in the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1989, where she graduated in 1994 and attended a specialised painting course a year later. In 2007, she obtained a degree in adult education from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. She has been self-employed in the field of culture since 1995. She works as a visual artist in the fields of painting, drawing, graphic art, spatial installations, and landscape art. She participates in restoration projects and leads creative workshops for children. She is the recipient of the 2011 May Salon Award, a nominee for the 2017 Jakopič Award, the recipient of the 2021 Ivana Kobilca Award for current production, and the recipient of the 2023 May Salon Grand Prize. She has been living and working in Škofja Loka for the past twenty years.