Nika Zupančič was born in 1978 in Ljubljana. She graduated in Painting in 2003, and with an MA in 2008 in Painting and Printmaking from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia and internationally, and has received prizes and accolades for her work. Her paintings are included in several art collections, including the Albertina Modern in Vienna. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Ljubljana Society of Fine Arts. The artist answered a few questions from the Kooness team to look into her artworks.
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Kooness: Describe what kind of art you focus on
Nika Zupančič: In my work I strive to bring together everything that has come before me in the history of painting, with the hope of course, of the birth of something new. In my paintings, this is a concrete fusion, in fact a marriage of the monochrome, modernist abstract surface with the illusory and narrative elements. I use traditional techniques of oil painting building - which I have studied extensively - in the desire to construct something new, something contemporary, something that is mine at this moment, distinctly my personal experience of being, conditioned by the time in which I live. Therefore, my works can also resemble a contemporary experience of, say, video or film, i.e. the image of the screen.
Kooness: What is your favourite medium? NZ: My favourite painting medium is oil on canvas. I have always been interested in painting in all its forms and especially in the very manifestation of the material. This living tissue of the painting can be experienced in the works of the great masters, such as those of my favorites Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, or in the great abstractionists of the 20th century. The duality of matter and content. Two sides of a coin, inextricably united. Painting has lost nothing in comparison with contemporary media because its nature within matter allows for inexhaustible formative possibilities. This is what fascinates me: the inexhaustibility of the medium itself. That everything is possible.
Kooness: Describe your painting series
NZ: My series of paintings allude to the constant flux of time, to the passing of forms, their disappearing, appearing, emerging through blurring. To present their non-static existence via static form of the painting. To show fluidity, that is, what is supposed to be reserved for other, more contemporary media that ˝sculpt˝ with time. A distinguished art critic noted that the vanitas motif manifests itself in my paintings, exemplified by the vanishing or emerging forms of natural phenomena: clouds, water, leaves, trees. These forms are fused with abstract surfaces, so that the characteristic feature of these paintings is the dualism of surface (self-referentiality) and narrative. We can see these paintings in one way or another: as a pure play of colours - a colour study, or as a play of clouds, of cloud sheep, moving across the summer sky.
Nika Zupančič. The Unnamable White II, 2016. Courtesy of Bazato Gallery
Kooness: How did artist in residencies affect your work?
NZ: As I said before, after studying at the Academy of arts in Ljubljana, I devoted myself to the praxis of painting and decoding the old masters’ ways of painting. I was most impressed with prof. Ernst van de Wetering, on a summer course in Amsterdam, who introduced me to Rembrandt. I learnt a lot about painting through analysing the works of the Old Masters during my art residencies. - In the decade after my studies, I spent a lot of time in Paris, much of it at the Cité Internationale des Arts, where museums were my home away from home. Then I went to Leipzig and rented a large studio in the Spinnerei, which served as a unique space of productive isolation during the time of corona, where I could devote myself to: experimentation, concentration and building a body of work. Finally, it was time for the daily painting practice that every painter strives for. Nulla dies sine linea. And time for reflection, contemplation, meditation. At the moment I live and work at home, in my hometown, Ljubljana. In a beautiful city in the heart of nature, surrounded by hills and mountains. At the central European crossroads between Trieste and Vienna. Everything is close here, everything is at your fingertips.
Cover image: Nika Zupančič. The Unnamable Black II, 2016. Courtesy of Bazato Gallery
Written by Kooness
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