Jože Šubic: Piggy bank for the artist

Jože Šubic: Piggy bank for the artist
29 September–21 October 2023
artKIT

You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition Piggy bank for the artist by painter and sculptor Jože Šubic, which will be held on Friday, September 29, 2023, at 7 p.m., at the artKIT exhibition space.

INVITATION (PDF)
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION (PDF)

With his new exhibition, Jože Šubic not only symbolically, but also actually completes an author's opus. For each of his exhibitions, he made a unique Piggy bank for the artist out of ceramics and attached it as an extra artefact to collect voluntary contributions for a visit, a catalog or something like that.

Now he decided to break them open and see what was inside them and display them as an autonomous installation. From a supporting role, in which many people did not notice them, they appear in the foreground. We experience them as something new and as a reminiscence, retrospective, recapitulation of his artistic journey. At the same time, with their abstract message, in which there is also some (self)irony, but even more reality, it places the artist in a business environment and addresses the attitude that society has towards him and art. It can also be interpreted as mischievous, since the piggy bank exists for most people only as a memory of childhood, but in the debris of life, such a gesture rings more alarming and sounds like a ballad.

And once again, as in previous years, Jože's exhibition Piggy bank for the artist is established as an installation, a rounded or assembled environment, which after the exhibitions Nine Stations of Your Taste (2011), Who is holding the water here? (2012), Glorious Twelfth (2020) fills sixteen ceramic piggy banks. This time, none of them will be seen as additional, parallel, infiltrated into their function of collecting, as it is thus transformed into a central art object and as such ’useless’, without desire, necessary and obligatory, for viewing and reflection.

The end of accepting donations as the final act of reckoning with the system of fine or visual art is accompanied by a video produced by Film Factory Maribor with a performative action of breaking the piggy banks as a final solution to the artist's statement and his commercial activity.

Bio

Jože Šubic was born in Maribor in 1958. In 1982 he graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he also completed his postgraduate studies in painting in 1984. He works in painting, sculpture, object art, ceramics and graphic art. He lives and works in Maribor. He has received the Glazer Award twice (1992 and 2013), as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award of the ZDSLU (2020), and many other national and international awards. His works have been shown in over 200 group and solo exhibitions.

< Jože Šubic: Piggy bank for the artist, 2023; photo, video: Film Factory Maribor

artKIT, Glavni trg 14, Maribor
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday from 3 to 7 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.