Leon Zuodar: 141%
26 August – 1 October 2015
KAPSULA, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition 141% by Leon Zuodar on Wednesday, 26 August 2015 at 19.00 at the KAPSULA in Ljubljana.
The exhibition entitled 141% was born from the artist’s interest in manipulating images with the help of the zoom function. Everything started with a photocopy. When the artist was preparing the documentation to renew his status as a self-employed cultural worker, he noticed that the photocopies of the presentation of drawings from one of his exhibitions were poor. The drawings were blurred, covered in grey, stretching across them were lines characteristic of a worn photocopier. He tried to fix these mistakes and imperfections by magnifying them with the zoom and, in doing so, he noticed that it made interesting distortions of the motifs on the drawings. Next he magnified the magnifications all the way until the original motifs were entirely blurred. The images had been transformed into completely abstract, more or less compressed raster graphics. The experiment would have most likely ended there, had the artist not been in that time working with screenprinting technique. He brought the images created with the zoom technique to a canvas turned to the unprimed side and, in doing so, achieved even further distortion of the original motifs. Or to put it differently, he created an entirely new artwork. The exhibition was thus created as a result of a completely technical, experimentally worked-out project.
Leon Zuodar (1977) obtained his degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, the centre of his field of work being painting in the broadest sense of the word. Paintings, graphic prints and drawings have an equal place in his work; for everything they typically arise in communication with popular culture and especially with urban subcultural movements. This is evident in some of the key visual elements (flatness, palimpsest, stylization, repetition and variation of motifs) as well as in iconography (the use of signs, slogans and mottos, typified shapes, popular images). Zuodar takes these elements and combines them into a new, highly personal, marked conglomeration, which functions as a playful commentary on everyday life, underlined with humour, irony and even sarcasm.
Mojca Grmek
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The programme of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and by the Municipality of Ljubljana, Department for Culture.