Academically trained painter Suzana Brborović is presenting a project in which she layers the plans of ideal cities. Her artwork is based on cityscapes and architectural utopias. Layering the plans of buildings she encounters in her immediate surroundings or on longer journeys doesn’t just lead to the lines crossing over each other, but also to the intertwining of the ideologies behind the buildings. The resulting mess of lines and plans prevents them from being read clearly, while at the same time providing a new perspective.
The artist began the project with a simple sketch of Dürer‘s ideal city. She soon discovered similarities between the concept of the ideal city and the modernist and socialist residential buildings of the 20th century. The ideal city is an idea that thinkers keep coming back to, starting with Plato‘s Republic, which intervenes in the idea of the ideal society. Many unrealised plans follow throughout history, for example Filarete‘s Sforzinde or Le Corbusier‘s project Ville Radieuse. Well-known is also the realised Italian town of Palmanova. The return to the perfect form and arrangement is everlasting, as we can find many residential building projects in the 20th century that offer inhabitants all the necessary facilities for work, leisure and a generally comfortable existence.
The artist finds the plans for such residential buildings or ideal cities appealing both visually and in content, and emphasises that the architecture we encounter says more than it seems to at first glance. Working in Leipzig, she grew familiar with the Plattenbau construction style, and while travelling in Russia, she visited the brutalist Bublik residential complex in Moscow. The building was once intended for comfortable family life, but is now experiencing high levels of crime and decay, and is inhabited by those who are forced to live at society’s very edge. By layering the realised and unrealised plans on top of each other, the artist creates utopian, visually exciting paintings that can, at a certain point, offer a new perspective and aesthetic experience.
Suzana Brborović (1988) is an academically trained painter who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in Ljubljana in 2013, with the thesis Reflected Shift (Urban landscape as a construct between painting and social context). In 2011, she received the first Essl Art Award in Slovenia. Among her other achievements, she received the ALUO Special Artistic Achievements Award in 2010 and the Prešeren Award for Students in 2012. Between 2014 and 2016, she attended postgraduate studies in painting (Meisterschüler) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Her work is included in the following collections: Essl (Vienna), Bayer Kultur (Düsseldorf), City Gallery (Nova Gorica) and Božidar Jakac Art Museum (Kostanjevica na Krki). She has held numerous solo exhibitions both in Slovenia and abroad, and splits her time between Leipzig and Ljubljana.
The Solo Exhibition Cycle is a series of exhibition projects in the upper lobby of Kino Šiška, prepared each year by a curator of the younger generation.
Curated by: Tia Čiček.
Organisation: Kino Šiška.
