Melancholy - Maruša Štibelj and Eva Mlinar

Maruša Štibelj (1986) graduated in art pedagogy at the Faculty of Education in Ljubljana. He searches for material for collages in old magazines and newspapers and constantly tries to expand the boundaries of collage as a self-sufficient medium, while maintaining the original spectrum of colours that the material offers. In 2018, at the Salon of Fine Arts in Paris, she received the jury prize for the work Chronically late. She is a member of the ZDSLU and the Kranj Art Society and the artistic director of the contemporary collage festival KAOS. She presents her work at solo exhibitions and regularly at numerous group exhibitions at home and abroad.

Eva Mlinar (1985) completed the study of art history at the Faculty of Arts and the study of visual communications at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She works in various fields of visual art; from book and contemporary illustration to painting; and she often introduces elements of collage into her works. She has already presented herself at several independent exhibitions, and regularly also exhibits at Slovenian and international illustration biennials (China, Croatia, France, Lithuania, …). In 2019, together with the writer and playwright Eva Mahkovic, she published a literary-visual collection of grotesques of an incompatible genre, Vignettes of the Coward, which was voted for the grand prize of the Slovenian Book Fair – Book of the Year 2019.

“…Without melancholy, the world would be deprived of many artistic creations, because it is precisely this feeling or, last but not least, the type of temperament that gives reflections on what is happening in and around us. Eva and Maruša take us to new dimensions, they create new, fantastic ones from real worlds, which, however, carry meaningful content, multiple meanings, and thus each story is revealed differently to everyone. They reveal their intimate questions, doubts, thoughts that touch on their views on the chaos unfolding in the seemingly pleasant world around us, on a society that is losing its basic values. They play with what they have seen and recreate with pieces from reality and reveal their findings, which they season with cheerfulness and humor, but at the same time with sharpness and criticism. The latter in this current project is based on a socially critical eye, especially towards frequent content on social networks and, of course, society as a whole, in which /too often contrary to reality/ the glorification of comfort and happiness prevails, which are expressed through banal sayings, proverbs, sentence conjunctions and images of “Happiness”, which continues to remain an intangible, undefined and, above all, highly dubious “good”…

(from a note at the Melancholia exhibition by exhibition curator Saša Bučan).