ADRIJAN PRAZNIK: KNOTS (solo exhibition)

Let us first explore the fine, yet controversial label used in contemporary artspeak: post-internet art. Having emerged with the accessibility, democratisation and popularisation of the Internet, post-internet art is based on Internet contents, which are adapted artfully into three-dimensional gallery artworks. The term is ambivalent, hinting at a premature marketing-driven historicisation of our time, whereas some people might even find the prefix post- confusing, as if it referred to art after the Internet, while it remains a central tool of our basic daily life (including the artist’s life). A younger generation artist, Adrijan Praznik is recontextualising mass media images, appropriating them as new integers. The starting point of his art is to be found in the full bloom of the omnipresent Internet, offering heaps of images, viral and more ephemeral, and just a few clicks away. Such digital strategies or such hacking into technology is blurred into a simple search for motifs, whereas the camouflage of recycling is perfected in artist’s layering of mastered painting techniques and his explorations of socially significant topics. His exhibition Knots is comprised of smaller canvasses featuring premeditated compositions ranging from muffled colour to colourful gradients. They invite, almost force the beholder to experience the painting knotting and combining the traditional painting approaches of full surfaces with collated additions, such as graphite drawings and printed computer images, as well as conceptions of the canvas in its material dimension, in which coats of colour are sometimes peeling off to expose decomposition and disappearance. The absence of monumentality and recognisable pop-cultural subjects hints at a disillusioned and critical view of the information age promising endless constant accessibility of all sorts of things, yet yielding to both the capital and current geopolitical conditions. Instead, Praznik’s works are populated by migrant birds (which are actually parrots) getting set back in repeating always the same verbal patterns, computer circuits functioning as a decorative labyrinth in this moment, and as a symbol of the expected technological transcendence above the X-ray of the artist’s head in the next, and a printed detailed plan for a robot hand, positioned by the painter alongside a free drawing by artist Ivana Bajec. With his works, Praznik places side by side the complementary technological and organic aspects, converts the “poor image” of the Internet (after Hito Steyerl), substituting the quality of the image by accessibility, seeks new examples of knotting and loosens the knots in which the contemporary Everyman is getting entangled virtually and IRL.

Lara Plavčak

Adrijan Praznik (1988) was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2008 to study painting, and later received the Academy award for special artistic achievements. In 2014 he presented his solo exhibition I Get off at the Next Station in Kino Šiška and together with Eva Lucija Kozak and Dr Petja Grafenauer conceived the exhibitions Mismatches I and II, which were set in Equrna Gallery and UGM Studio, Maribor. In the same year, his solo show The Lost World was staged in Alkatraz Gallery. In 2015 he participated in the exhibition Tribuna; lep časopis in the amphitheatre of Moderna Galerija, and in the Lighting Guerrilla group exhibition In the Dark in Vžigalica Gallery. He stayed in Riga and Berlin as artist in residence, where together with Eva Lucija Kozak and Dr Petja Grafenauer he was devising the Mismatches exhibition to be shown at the Slovenian embassy, and the exhibition Dezemberausstellung with the support of Toppalais. At the end of 2015 he participated in the group exhibition Equrna POP! in Equrna Gallery. He was a regular contributor to Tribuna magazine and his works were published in many other publications as well.

Curator: Lara Plavčak
Consulting: Sara Živkovič
Organisation: Kino Šiška