Brane Širca: Silhouettes

Brane Širca is regarded as a highly engaged visual artist, whose painting, graphic and sculptural cycles reveal an exceptional sensitivity to social imbalances. His artistic narrative is woven in a field of existentially coloured figurative art. The exhibited painting objects, brought together in the series entitled Paris Silhouettes, were created on the basis of photographic documentation of the hustle and bustle of the anonymous crowds of people flooding the streets, boulevards and squares of the French capital. In addition to the lively dynamics of everyday urban life, the pulse that Širca has captured through the lens also reveals the less pleasant sides of contemporary life, imbued with the logic of consumption. It is precisely this kind of layering of existence that constitutes the core of the exhibition in terms of content. Širca has once again mounted the artworks on inflatable paper bags intended to protect goods during transport. He uses the bags to render human figures without details, without faces, without identity, and in a synesthetic spirit they could easily be described as mute, as they seem to stand helplessly in a vacuum – even literally, when the artist fills the base of the images with air. The figures are symbolically depicted in white or black silhouettes, which clearly refers to spiritual devaluation or existential weight. In the exhibited works, we witness lonely individuals who rush past each other, fence themselves off into their own worlds and do not communicate with each other. Along with existential burdens, elements of homeliness and nostalgia can also be recognised in the works in the form of an ornament created with a painter’s roller.

Curator: Irma Brodnjak Firbas

 

The exhibition has been prepared in cooperation with the Ljubljana Fine Artists Society.