Group exhibition
Nova Gorica City Gallery, Nova Gorica (SI)
15. 3. – 26. 4. 2024
Curator: Nadja Zgonik
Co-curator: Tina Konec
Tina Konec’s work revolves around two main themes: exploring the possibilities offered by drawing as a medium and depicting nature in all of its glory. Since discovering in her final years of study that she was more attracted to drawing than painting, she has been systematically developing her vocabulary in that discipline. Her work stands out on the Slovenian scene because of her consistency, her persistent probing of the medium’s possibilities, and her systematic experimentation. She focuses on what we call the essence of drawing – the stark contrast in the black line’s relationship to its light background. She delves into the effects of pencils and different drawing substrates, tests the translucency of tracing paper, embeds drawings in light boxes, or plays with optical deception using digitised drawings. In her more recent works, her unrivalled sense of the aesthetic surprisingly collides with environmental issues to surprising effect. With the series Duality of the Beautiful, from which the works in the exhibition are taken, she confronts us in an unexpected way with the theme of encounters between nature and civilised surroundings. There is a semantic gap between the title of the works and what we see. We no longer know how to interpret the confrontation between an idyllic fragment of a conifer canopy, which is intended to evoke in the viewer a pleasant feeling of natural shelter, and an object, such as a plastic bag or a car tyre, which is a foreign body in nature, but which, discarded by man, has been there for so long that its aesthetic manifestation constitutes a part of its environment. Using the optical play of the compound image in the third dimension, with which one can behold the image such that the waste disappears, the viewers are not confronted with a direct sharpness that would arouse in them a feeling of guilt about the destruction of the environment that they would then suppress into oblivion as soon as they leave the gallery. Instead, the artist uses the soft power of the aesthetic object, whose image becomes imprinted in memory in a way that is impossible to forget.
Nadja Zgonik