OSM / EYT : Nevena Aleksovski, Ivana Bajec, Nina Čelhar, Neža Jurman (Nez Pez), Simon Kocjančič, Miha Perne, Zoran Pungerčar, Leon Zuodar :

Osm / Eyt is an exhibition by eight artists, four women and four men, which is neither a coincidence nor a precise curatorial constellation. It is an initiative by a group that has no formal status and does not have a commonly defined artistic tendency. It cannot be labelled by generation or a narrowed spectrum of medium. More than study at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, it is interlinked by similar non-formal interests, a concern for less conventional modes of artistic engagement and parallel artistic environments that are not tied to one medium only. Nevertheless, the eight artists are united by the fact that two-dimensional art techniques are used most faithfully in their practice. At some point the group found itself under the auspices of the newly established art spaces in Ljubljana, such as Dobra Vaga and the Ravnikar Gallery Space, the artists have presented themselves in several variations at exhibitions in Izola, Ljubljana’s Škuc Gallery, Alkatraz and MGLC, and they have also outlined the programme of the House of Culture in Pivka in the recent period.

What we have before us, therefore, is chiefly a painting exhibition, from which a collective initiative arises through the interest of the collected artists for the medium of painting, printmaking, drawing and activities in the field of zine production. It rouses the views on the production of the creators that combines several areas of contemporary artistic creation and attempts to create communication between their visual interests, to seek the common points of encounter and divergence. There is a waft of the alternative in places, the all too known resistance against the safe build-up of the painting and classic aesthetic certainty, it slips into the language of sign and colour, the search for meanings at several levels of sign-making, including the humorous conceptual approach, toying between materiality and the quest for innovative graphic formulae. Alongside the more recent painterly production of larger canvases, also smaller drawings appear that express the instantaneousness of the artistic expression, the diary note-like strokes of the artist’s personality, narrative everyday life, or a critical outline of the contemporary moment. More