Mitja Stanek - TECHNO

The project that Mitja Stanek (1964, Maribor) has prepared for the Lapidarium of the Božidar Jakac Gallery is based on a spatial installation that literally extends into all the rooms and generates a saturated sensation of our digitalised consumer society. As a site-specific project, the installation would be enough in itself, but precisely in order to show the developmental and study-based axis of the modernist approach, we have decided to include in the rooms a selection of prints ranging in date from the early 1990s to 2014 and a number of Stanek's sculptures, most of which date from a year or two ago.

In the 1990s Stanek devoted himself intensively to printmaking. One of the first cycle is he developed was a series of telephones, created in 1995. In the following cycle it evolves into a complex network structure, irritating him to such an extent that he experiments with various ways of entering the space: from merely relief forms that still carry in themselves the inherent characteristics of two-dimensional painting, to the regular forms of a cube cast in bronze

The installation deliberately prepared for the rooms of the lapidarium, a site-specific sculpture made of plastic ready-made pipes as a sculptural tool, is thus a logical synthesis of the oeuvre described above, while also building on it. It can also refer, through the structure of the material, to the social aspect of the devaluation of labour in a post-consumer society, while on a more direct level it conjures up in the viewer the physical sensation of the narrow saturation of the alienated information society.

Curator: Goran Milovanovic

Photographer: Tomaz Grdin