Dušan Kirbiš: Fons opus

Dušan Kirbiš’s painting is characterised by reflection on the current “phenomenology” of images, and by thought about painting as well as about cultural and material production. His recent work focuses on the relationship between the painting and the image, that is, the dialogue between their material interdependence and conceptual difference.

As a painter, Kirbiš moves away from both expressive autopoetics and the contextualisation of the image in relation to other image-creating spheres, such as media culture and technologically generated images. Instead, he is interested in the minimal conditions that, as he says, “give the mental painting field the status of an image” that is autonomous and at the same time without ideological pretensions about the status of painting. He explores his idea with objectified images or “flat objects”, with which he attempts to reconstruct the metastatus of the image, that is, the idea of the image as an open form through which various projections flow, crystallising between the poles of thought and emotion, between reason and intuition.

Exhibition curator: Nadja Gnamuš

Dušan Kirbiš (1953) is a full professor at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana. From 1973 to 1978, he studied painting at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, during which time he often travelled to European cultural centres. Among other things, he studied the works of Renaissance painters in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum. From 1978 to 1982, he continued his studies in painting and then completed a specialisation in graphics. Between 1986 and 1990, he pursued his creative work and furthered his studies as a DAAD scholar (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in Berlin. In 1990, he lived and worked in New York, returning to Ljubljana in 1991.

In cooperation with the Ljubljana Fine Artists Society.

We recommend using the funicular railway to visit the exhibition.