Nina Stopar: Encounters on the Edges of Self
Nina Stopar: Encounters on the Edges of Self
17 January–15 February 2025
artKIT
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition Encounters on the Edges of Self by the painter, performer and poet Nina Stopar, which will take place on Friday, 17 January 2025, at 6 p.m. in the artKIT exhibition space.
INVITATION (PDF)
“When does it all begin? When I take the brush in my hand and approach the canvas?
I dance, I move over the canvas and around it. I combine different materials and the creative process is more important than what is left/created in the end. The process is the core of my work. The paintings are just documents – like a memory of something past.
In my paintings I depict what eludes identification by always returning to the origin of movement, color and line as the pure abstract gesture before the concept. I can say that my art is embryonic, as it explores the potential of the pre-concrete, as a dance between everything and nothing. There is an emptiness that is not still in a silence that is not empty. The white space is also filled with installations of found, discarded objects that, on the contrary, express the potential of something that has lost its value, like perhaps silence.”
In her first solo exhibition in Maribor, the artist explores how people and space define us and what we really are; in other words, what is the self other than the space and the people who define it. She is interested in the questions of identity and authenticity and how such definitions and encounters shape the image that those who look with their eyes see, as well as the image of the moment, here and now.
Nina Stopar relates her painting to the legacy of action painting and abstract expressionism. The body intuits this, she says: “I am the brush, I am the color, I am the form, I am the painting. I love to lose myself in the unconscious field of painting and find my true expression.”
Biography
Nina Stopar (1982) is a professor of Slovenian language and philosophy, poet, visual artist and dancer, who graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in 2007 and completed her MA studies at the same institution in 2016 with the thesis Contemporary Art in Philosophical Reflection under the mentorship of Dr Lev Kreft. After almost ten years of teaching, she switched to the field of visual arts and in 2021 completed her Master’s degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana with the thesis Body Painting as a Spiritual Change in the Time of Indeterminacy under the mentorship of Prof. Sergei Kapus and Dr. Lev Kreft. Since then, she has been engaged in a variety of creative practices, from classical painting to body painting and performance, dance and poetry.
Lives and works in Žerjav, Črna na Koroškem, and Ljubljana.
https://www.ninastopar.art/
< Nina Stopar: Moonlight Dance, mixed technique, 2023–24; photo: Dobran Laznik
artKIT, Glavni trg 14, Maribor
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m; Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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