GALLERY OPENING: 12. 11. 2019 AT 19:00

Mateja Sever (1970, Ljubljana) is a graduate of the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, where she also completed her master’s degree in painting. She continued her postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts (Facultad de bellas artes) in Madrid (1995) and the University of Applied Arts (Visoka Škola Umenih Promislova) in Prague (1996). In 1997 and 1998, she lived and worked in New Mexico, USA, and from 2005 to 2007 in Switzerland. In addition to exhibiting, Mateja Sever has published two poetry collections and a book of prose. She is employed as an art teacher.

I AM (NOT) ME

In a series of (self-)portraits based on (family) photographs, Mateja Sever, who holds a master’s degree in fine art, engages with the issue of elusive identity in a mature yet playful way. Despite their strong colour contrasts, one does not perceive an existential struggle in her works, but rather the calmness of the portrait subjects themselves. It is as if the painter has squeezed the truth out of them with the maximum intensification of colours, allowing this truth to radiate on a neutral, white basis. The latter does not judge, let alone condemn. In some of the works, especially the self-portraits, the artist takes another path. She abandons colour and illuminates the face – her own face – for so long that the essence shines on it. It is as if she had filtered the brushstrokes through dense gauze, on which only the gaze finally remains. This gaze is not fixed on her, the creator, but somewhere beyond. Only in this way, from a distance, can we see ourselves. And each other. By leaving the whiteness, the artist seems to be trying to say that there is more of the universal in us than the individual. She urges us to abandon the narcissism of small differences, and our faces will radiate peace and joy.

Maša Ogrizek

The exhibition was prepared in cooperation with Fine Artists Society of Ljubljana.