Mitja Ficko: The Star Stick 24 November–16 December 2023 MMC KIBLA/KiBela
You are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition The Star Stick by the academic painter and artist Mitja Ficko, which will take place on Friday, 24 November 2023, at 7 p.m. at the KiBela, space for art. INVITATION (PDF) ABOUT THE EXHIBITION (PDF)
The entry point to Mitja Ficko's exhibition entitled The Star Stick begins with the visual display of its visual tissue under the magnifying glass of the exhibition microscope KiBela. The painterly creative process is a living and elusive thing, it is often difficult to say when it begins or ends, when it is restored and when it is eternally fluid. But the opposite is also possible, namely when the end result of the creative process, project, work or vision is clear and the artist senses or knows when the painting is finished and complete. We can see the artist’s work in different ways and attach different values to its content. At present, however, he consciously chooses to make his work elusive and difficult to define, with undertones of transience and fluidity.
The Star Stick is an open title that attempts to capture the associative in a metaphor. The stick can also be seen as a wish, depending on expectations and preferences. It can transport us into a world in which images become building blocks. When you turn over the golden stick, you also turn over the building blocks. And what you get are never the same pictures that represent nothing and appear unfinished. Imagine twelve blocks. Each block has six sides. Each face represents a part of the image. Only when all the blocks are correctly arranged with the sides of the same picture can you see the whole picture, which consists of twelve fragments. The puzzle contains six different images.
Mitja Ficko’s paintings are mosaics of different surfaces, blocks and puzzle pieces thrown together, which do not form a complete image. Since they are unfinished, they illustrate the idea of composition and flow, as the blocks change position and reveal or conceal their sides depending on the artist’s mood.
The ambience of the gallery offers a kind of pause and invites the viewer to slow down and observe the current selection of building blocks, i.e. Mitja Ficko's paintings.
At the center of his work is the coexistence of abstract and figurative elements. Ficko’s paintings are the result of a search for form and structure and predominantly take the form of collages. The narrative lines – if they are present at all – are usually extremely reticent, as the title of the current exhibition also expresses. Their associative field is wide open and often of secondary importance to the author himself.
The various series of paintings, which at first glance appear to contradict each other, point to a multi-layered painterly interest that branches out freely and without restrictions, not just two-dimensionally but multi-dimensionally, into an orchestrated arrangement of newly created works of art.
About the artist
Mitja Ficko was born in Murska Sobota in 1973 and grew up in Ljutomer, Slovenia. He is an assistant professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (2023). He studied with J. Bernik, G. Gnamuš and specialized with Metka Krašovec. From 2004 to 2023 he worked as a freelance artist.
