Terms

Existentialist Figuration

The experience of suffering during wartime and the uncertainty of contemporary life have long inspired artists to reflect on humankind and the human condition, to explore human existence. Existentialist figuration focuses on the body as the central possibility of experience and as both the content and formal source of the wide-open field of visual arts. The struggle of modernist art to free itself from its dependence on the (human) body proved to be a utopian illusion, for the figure – whole or fragmented, barely perceptible or completely covered – remains the fundamental principle and the canon behind our visual perception of the world. Sooner or later, existential experience, transposed into the artistic expression of suggestive aesthetics, invalidates the many established ideas about humankind and the world, about social relations, the transparency of the world and the value of human action. In such works of art, we find visible traces of the process of painting or sculpting and the expressively structured layers of paint or the treatment of material, and figures are deformed following the example of expressionism, often represented as uncanny, even shocking, by means of unconventional and grotesque visualisation procedures.

  • Herman Pivk

    Model 1/1 / Model 1/1, 2006

    unique photo on canvas

    h: 100 cm; w: 148 cm

    © Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti ©Herman Pivk

  • Jože Tisnikar

    Birth and Death, 1975 / Rojstvo in smrt

    oil, tempera, canvas, chip board

    162 x 130 cm

    © Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti, photo Tomo Jeseničnik

  • Valentin Oman

    Petrified Memories, Piran / Okameneli spomini, Piran 1999

    acrylic, canvas

    200 x 145 cm

    © Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti, photo Tomo Jeseničnik

  • Zoran Mušič

    Register of Cadavers / Graphic folder Cadastre de Cadavres, 1974

    7 lithographic prints

    19 / 130, 44 x 108 cm

    6 / 7 lithographic prints in a folder

    © Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti, photo Tomo Jeseničnik

  • Zdenko Huzjan

    The Guardian of the Nest / Varuh gnezda, 2002

    oil, canvas

    70 x 50 cm

    © Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti, photo Tomo Jeseničnik

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