under the counter
The artistic practice of Mladen Stropnik, shaped around works on paper, collages, drawings and short video loops, builds up on a specific intervention in the spaces of the everyday, immediate and recognizable, yet wondrous and distorted. Mladen’s artistic process is shaped around minimalist and conceptualist practices, and his artistic gesture operates through cuts and breaks while the narrative is reduced to a minimum, relying on a consistent visual language and a certain economy of representation. Mladen Stropnik’s drawings or collages are based on minimal gestures intervening in the conceptual and abstract frameworks, as hints and fragments of the visible world, its bare and basic abstract details, often with elements of humor, playfulness, curiosity…Within such new relationships unfolds the title of the exhibition at Apoteka “under the counter,” which invites the viewer to try to figure out new meanings, articulate the unknown, what the artist is holding as a surprise, under the table, as a range of options in the relation with the everyday, the usual and unusual, to expose it, inviting us to look again.
Curated by: Branka Bencic
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Mladen Stropnik, born in Slovenj Gradec in 1977., lives in Ljubljana. Solo exhibitions (selection): night train (whos there?), gallery Škuc, Ljubljana, 2014; LET GO, galerija gregor podnar, Ljubljana, 2013 / Group exhibitions (selection): Crossings, International center of graphic arts, Ljubljana, 2014; THE PLEASURE IS MINE, gallery ŠKUC, Ljubljana, 2013; Intergraf Alpe Adria, Villa Manin, Udine, IT, 2012; 29th graphic biennale, Ljubljana, 2011. He was recipient of the OHO Award for young artist in 2008 and artist in residence at ISCP NYC.
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