Ludvik Pandur
From the Covers series, 1999
oil on canvas, 20 x 30 cm, 35 x 45 cm, 60 x 70 cm, 60 x 70 cm
courtesy of the artists
“There’s always an eeriness to my paintings; it ranges from the beautiful to the grotesque; that delimited beauty that teases and provokes.” (Ludvik Pandur)
The interplay between the figure and the landscape, as well as the transformation of the former into the latter and vice versa, is a highly intimate experience for the painter Ludvik Pandur. It is a translation via oneself, through the sediments of memories, states, and experiences, and through the medium of painting, through the history of painting rather than an observation from the outside. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the Covers series, created in 1999. At this time, we meet the artist at the start of his mature period, when he has reached middle age. With their small formats the series is intimate, but they are also an account of the artist’s reckoning with himself, with his own transience, and with the boundaries of his own corporeality. The artist experiences multiple health scares and hospitalisation, which have both visible and invisible repercussions. Covers follows one of these hospitalisations, when the artist was admitted to the Maribor hospital for a longer period of time. The ghostly vista, the sight of the hospital buildings under his window where he noticed plastic covers – skylights – on the roofs filled him with despair. “I was eager to see a landscape. So, I envisioned a scene behind the three ponds in the Maribor park. Landscapes sprang to mind, almost as hallucinations. Landscape as a nude, in fact. It’s pretty remarkable being a landscape that is lying down, all sorts of things go through your mind, but it’s not a state I would recommend to anyone. It may be beneficial to the artwork, but it is less advantageous for the artist himself.”
oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm, courtesy of the artists, photo: Damjan Švarc
Ludvik Pandur (b. 1947) was born in Slovenj Gradec into a bourgeois family from Lendava. He and his family relocated to Maribor when he was a child, where he attended school until his graduation. His paternal uncle and father Lajči Pandur were both artists, so he was literally born into the painter’s profession. He studied painting at the Zagreb Academy, where he later joined the master’s workshop led by painter Krsto Hegedušić. Pandur returned to Maribor in 1973, where he has produced prolifically in his studio on Maistrova ulica and at home, all while travelling abroad and attending various colonies across Slovenia over the years. Since his first solo exhibition in Maribor’s Rotovž Exhibition Salon in 1971, he has been featured in various exhibitions at home and abroad, from Ljubljana, Piran, and Ptuj to New York, Munich, and Madrid. He was a popular professor at the University of Maribor’s Faculty of Education until his retirement. In 2021 UGM | Maribor Art Gallery organised a retrospective exhibition of his work.
