Natalija Juhart Brglez: Geometric Walks: Exploring the Urban Landscape
Natalija Juhart Brglez: Geometric Walks: Exploring the Urban Landscape 12 January–10 February 2024 artKIT
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition Geometric Walks: Exploring the Urban Landscape by artist and painter Natalija Juhart Brglez, which will take place on Friday, 12 January 2024, at 7 p.m. at artKIT.
We find ourselves in the aesthetics of artist Natalija Juhart Brglez's lyrical spatial graphic works. By exploring the urban space, she creates a uniquely original view of the city, captured in her focus and love for the city, its architecture and buildings. By observing what is in the moment, she creates urban compositions that capture the everyday life of the city, exploring the paths and passages from one point to another and from one building to another. The emerging or disappearing passages, paths, intersections and junctions, compositions and spaces in between offer a variety of views and unique perspectives that the artist captures in her prints. On every path, in every scene, you can find both chaos and order, calm and bustle. And at every turn, you can also see the beauty of life, which is often much closer and much more often within our grasp than we imagine.
On a walk through the city, the eye lingers at certain points of convergence, condensed perspectives and expressive contrasts. Regardless of the season, the city’s buildings stand still as silent components and harbingers of what is and what has been. We always see them differently, from different angles, with an angle in the composition, an ascending view or a turn. Seemingly simple graphic works depict familiar urban spaces, but their unique compositions strike the viewer as completely new, offering a fresh perspective. Her visual backdrops display an aesthetic of perfection and a rich architectural imagination that springs from her creative source. Her explorations of the urban landscape create pathways that invite a walk through the passages that bring together subtle, gentle collages and the artist's cubist visual memories and dreams.
The artist’s work focuses on the exploration of urban space. She analyzes it through the eyes of the walker who returns to a particular place and explores it by noticing architectural features, geometric structures or ornaments. Individual condensed details are brought together in a composition through repetitions of geometric elements to form a spatially coherent whole of a panorama or veduta, but the artist also strives to shape the space by bringing together and breaking up several perspectives and views of a place. She merges precise, almost architectural drawings of the city with color surfaces and spatial lines. In this way, she presents the familiar city with new accents, anomalies and mirror images.
The artist starts from a precise drawing that is refined using the traditional printing techniques of intaglio, etching and aquatint or a combination of these techniques and, for some years now, screen printing. She also makes stitched drawings with black thread to explore the different qualities of this material.
Biography
Natalija Juhart Brglez (1992, Ptuj) completed her master's degree in art education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Maribor under Prof. Sandi Červek in 2018 and her master's degree in printmaking under Prof. Branko Suhy at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Ljubljana in 2019.
She is the winner of the Excellence Award in the Japanese competition Utazu Art Award Biennale (2018), the Recognition Award of the Biennial of Slovene Graphic Arts (2019), the Prešeren Award of the Academy of Visual Arts and Design Ljubljana (2017/18) for a series of seven prints of Venice, the Primavera Charter and the Curator's Award of the Maribor Fine Artists Society (2019 and 2021) and an honorable mention at the International Graphic Triennial in Bitola 2021 for her contribution to the development of graphic art. She exhibits nationally and internationally. She lives, works and creates in Maribor.
