The exhibition presents the most recent sculptural and photographic works of Marijan Mirt, created during his study residency in Paris in 2024, alongside a survey of Irena Gajser’s ten-year painting production. The connection between Mirt’s black-and-white photographs of animal sculptures and Gajser’s painterly abstraction is neither immediately obvious nor easily grasped – and yet it exists. Each artist, in their own way, reveals intersections between the macro- and microcosm, and through two distinct visual languages unveils what lies beneath the surface bustle – a bustle that easily distracts us and prevents us from attending to the recurring patterns of behavior, life, and visual manifestations.
Paris is perceived as one of the most impressive, endlessly described and thematized cities, long a cradle of major artistic, literary, architectural, and political changes. Less obvious, however, is the way Paris is designed as a city that immediately embraces the visitor through its formal coherence. The sky is always visible, unbroken by cables and billboards. Its architecture is unified, with few disruptive elements to interrupt the flow of the gaze. The scale and possibilities of the city reveal themselves layer by layer, through small insertions into everyday life, gradually adapting the narrative of the city to both visitors and inhabitants alike. Even the humble Parisian bollards – an object already thematized in Mirt’s sculptural practice – blend subtly into their surroundings, while also bearing witness to change and transformation.
During each stay in Paris, Mirt has turned his attention to deviations from the established order of the city. His twisted bollard De Rien reflected on the complexities of foreignness in a culturally saturated urban environment. This time, however, it is wild animals inserted into the city that question the established perception of Paris and urban spaces in general. The exploration of coexistence between wild animals and the urban environment functions as a metaphor for marginalized groups of all kinds who seek ways of integration. Yet the animals are not only metaphor: such coexistence of species can be observed in virtually every city, intensified where natural habitats are drastically diminished. The contrast and strangeness of this phenomenon stand out most starkly in highly regulated environments like Paris – and even more fascinating is how these animals, like marginalized human groups, become invisible to the majority, despite actively, decisively, and constantly shaping the life of the city.
By placing his realistic animal sculptures in various parts of the nocturnal, emptied Paris, the artist positions himself as a flâneur – the Baudelairean urban wanderer, blending into the crowd yet mentally detached from the flow of society, able to observe with clarity and transform his perception into creative interpretation. The fox and boar sculptures in his photographs appear utterly real, painfully protruding and isolated from the foreign environment in which they are staged. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, describes the everyday tactics by which city dwellers disrupt the established rhythm of the system, inserting creativity and resistance into monotony. Mirt’s sculptural interventions can be understood as one such tactic, but also as the outcome of the “acceleration of the nervous system” diagnosed in urban life by Georg Simmel and later developed by Walter Benjamin into a theory of art emerging from continuous urban shocks.
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In her part of the exhibition, Irena Gajser presents works from her Blue and Red cycles, the Ex Supra – A View from Above series, and several newer or non-cyclical works. Her practice spans a wide range of visual approaches, yet remains faithful to prevailing abstraction, shifting between geometric and spiritual forms, occasionally echoing the Bauhaus. She demonstrates mastery of many technical approaches – informel with mixed materials, installation, collage, watercolor, oil, acrylic, ceramics – always subordinating technique to the final expressive aim.
Geometry is consistently at the center of Gajser’s interest, interpreted in ways that freely explore elements of spirituality, corporeality, landscapes, and personal perception. At the heart of abstraction lies the necessity for the viewer to transform what is seen into a visual hypothesis – a schema through which higher structure is perceived within the flow of stimuli. This in turn may be abstracted into further projections, until the object world is fully defined and clarified – transfigured through senses and emotions into art. A degree of mysticism, or at least deeper psychological affect, is always present in abstraction, as it demands prolonged subjective engagement, bodily responses, and associative thinking.
Many of the seminal abstractionists turned to sacred geometry, the subconscious, and the redefinition of the role of forms and colors as symbolic carriers of meaning – Hilma af Klint, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers. The latter, in encouraging observation of formal elements, also advocated for the development of ethical, precise perception, which in turn enabled more critical awareness of society.
Gajser follows in this lineage of abstraction, drawing from intuitive interpretation of geometric forms. The dialogue between macro- and microcosm emerges in her focus on forming stimuli into elemental shapes, which through interaction acquire new associative dimensions. Through her sustained exploration of geometry, she often emphasizes the relationship between the square and the circle: the square as symbol of the earthly, the circle as the spiritual, both grounded with organic materials that unite them into a whole, communicating a spectrum of nuances and forms between. Though born of binary origins, the elements evolve into unique realizations, shaping their own narratives and rejecting rigidity. Interweaving, dissolution, transparency, assembling, and reduction generate a play of forms that, across formal variations, reveal narrative connections. For instance, in the Blue cycle, accents of color and form recur that resonate in other groups of works, demonstrating the consistency of her expression while also pointing to the unboundedness of discovery.
The partial retrospective presented here is likewise a glimpse into the artist’s personal macro- and microcosms, which remain in a constant process of transformation and growth.
Sara Nuša Golob Grabner