Fortuna Lazar: Images of Faces 1 –30 December 2023 artKIT
You are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition Images of Faces by the artist and painter Fortuna Lazar, which will take place on Friday, 1 December 2023, at 6 p.m. at the artKIT exhibition venue.
*The exhibition has been extended until 6 January 2024. Visits to the exhibition in January 2024 are by appointment only, please contact us at kibla@kibla.org.
The exhibition shows works of art that explore portrait motifs and combine various drawing and painting techniques such as pencil, black and colored ink, watercolor and acrylic. The starting point for the artist’s works is mainly portrait photography (fashion, close-up), which is then reworked using the techniques of drawing and painting to give it a new, enhanced identity that often emerges from within the artist.
This includes intimate and distinct details that are translated into an artistic form that is the result of the vulnerability, fluidity and permeability of the watercolor medium. The portraits can evoke memories and conjure up the image of someone you may have seen before. The works show a wide range of emotions, sometimes melancholy and sadness, sometimes daydreaming and the exuberance of life. This heterogeneity of artistic interpretation of portraits offers the viewer the opportunity to engage with the complexity of the human spirit.
We find ourselves in an exhibition space with numerous perspectives, some of which are directed towards us, while others turn away from us. Most of the communication is through the immediate heterogeneity and expressivity of the eyes, gazes that follow us wherever we turn.
The artist's wide arc of inspiration encompasses her initial childhood curiosity when she first came into contact with fashion magazines as the intersection of fashion photography, fashion and female beauty, but also later, leading to an inexhaustible interest in the media of photography, film and painting, which have strongly influenced her.
The figures, the images of faces carry a hint of physicality that fades away. Some images are almost fused with color, diffused, they melt and merge, others are created with the technique of drawing, exploring the posture, structure, composition and clarity of the delicate realism of interiority depicted. The contours of the originally realistic image only develop a more integrated painterly language through the various painting techniques and treatments.
Several palettes are created in the structure of the painterly esthetic. One of them finds its source of inspiration in the character expressions of the faces. It encompasses the character of strong presence, provocation and earthiness, which the artist anchors with darker planes and strong lines, creating the dramatic effect, three-dimensionality and vibrancy of the painting. The counterpoint to the earthy depiction is the delicate transparency of the colors, the lyrical and poetic dreaminess of the faces, the grace and beauty, the tenderness and vulnerability achieved through the subtlety of the translucent watercolor medium.
When we talk about the images of faces, we can recognize ourselves in every face, perhaps not in the image itself, but certainly in its expressiveness, which conveys a message in the eyes and facial expressions. Perhaps the images are unfamiliar and strange to us, but we all share a common language of emotions that we can all translate and recognize.
Biography
Fortuna Lazar, born in 1982 in Murska Sobota, is a professor of fine arts in Lendava. After studying art education in Maribor, she devoted her knowledge and creativity to teaching and creating art in the school environment. She expresses her own ideas mainly with the watercolor technique and the motif of women's portraits. In 2014, she exhibited in the production and exhibition spaces of the Uho-Oko Institute and the Central Station in Maribor. A year later, her illustrations were published in issues of Modna magazine. Years later, her work was subordinated to motherhood, but now she is presenting new work for the first time in a long time.
