Marko Jakše SLEPA ČEZ GLUHONEMEGA

Marko Jakše
Slepa čez gluhonemega
13 January 2017 – 11 February 2017
KiBela, space for art / MMC KIBLA, Maribor, Slovenia

Marko Jakše returns to MMC KIBLA with a cycle of paintings from 2016 (previously exhibited in the Celica Gallery in Ljubljana), and additional new works.

Marko Jakše was born in 1959 in Ljubljana. In 1987 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana, and has worked ever since as a freelance artist. His works were exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions home and abroad, winning several national and international awards and recognitions. He is a receiver of the most eminent Slovenian prize – the Prešeren Foundation Award 2015, for his exhibitions over the past two years.

About the exhibition

From the award justification text for the Prešeren Foundation Award 2015 (Dr. Ferdinand Šerbelj):

"Painter Marko Jakše graduated in 1987 from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana, drawing attention to his works shortly after, through his use of ingenious metaphors of European civilization sediments, derived from the repository of the human unconscious. His painterly interpretation of motives, balladic or melancholic to some, and provocative to others, is alluring even to the unsuspecting observer.

From the initial curiosity and following a decodization of the selected motif, Jakše’s canvases incur sympathy and enthusiasm. The abundant figurative and motivic world, with its specific, recognizable, Jakše-like colorfulness, showcases his fabulative talent to his interpreters. Especially so, because the painter’s iconographic scope is exceptionally broad all the time, a consequence of the constant exploration of both natural and fantastical forms.

What is surprising is his exuberant creativity, mostly in large canvases, interspersed with his own, idiosyncratic language. Marko Jakše is one of the most original Slovenian artists on a broader temporal scale, and one of the very few that satisfy the two basic conditions of a person’s genuine artistic calling: he has something to say, and knows how to say it. This is why his painting opus within the fine arts’ domain of our era is a noticeable and substantial contribution to our general art-related confidence as a nation."