Herman Gvardjančič
SLOVENAE 22 /Karst/, 2022
The series of drawings SLOVENAE 22 /Karst/ relates to the devastating fires in the Karst region of Slovenia in 2022. The works, employing combinations of different techniques (charcoal, acrylic paint, ash), conceptually follow Gvardjančič’s SLOVENAE painting project from the 1980s. Similarly, they are also closely connected to a recent series created in the wake of the fires in Australia. The SLOVENAE project is ongoing and focuses on themes such as love of the homeland and native soil.
mixed media on canvas, 170 x 218 cm, courtesy of the artist
Herman Gvardjančič (b. 1943, Gorenja vas – Reteče near Škofja Loka) is one of the most prominent representatives of expressive figurative art in Slovenia. Regardless of the medium, his work is always direct, vigorous, with only partially controlled strokes of the pencil or brush. In his meditative reflection on his existential experience of the world, he draws on a landscape in which the states of the human psyche are symbolically and metaphorically mirrored, and departs from two equally important stimuli for his work: the tradition of gestural abstraction of high modernism and the tradition of expressionist articulation of emotion. Gvardjančič studied painting at the University of Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) from 1964 to 1968 under professor Maksim Sedej, and he also completed his postgraduate studies in 1970 there under professor Zoran Didek. He travelled on study trips to Poland and Germany and taught art in primary schools from 1971 to 1991, after which he became self-employed as an artist. He taught drawing and painting at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Ljubljana between 1987 and 1997. He worked as the Head of the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana from 1997 until his retirement. Since his retirement he lives and works in his native village. In 2023, he received the Prešern Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest recognition for a career in the arts in Slovenia.
