Miha Maleš - poetic painter

Miha Maleš is a great name in Slovenian art. He was one of the most important figures in Slovenian artistic life and besides his various artistic activities he is marked also by another side to his character. 

In 1979, Miha Maleš donated an extensive collection of his works to the city of Kamnik with a deed of gift. If we subtract the donated publications, this is exactly 2590 works. The municipality soon found a townhouse at Glavni trg 2, which housed this extensive donation the following year. During this long period, we presented Miha Maleš at numerous exhibitions as a painter, graphic artist, draftsman, creator of sacred works, bibliophile, ceramicist, lover of our greatest poet, France Prešeren, and someone who knew how to connect and selflessly present, to mention only his youthful initiative, which gave rise to the Fourth Generation.

In recent years, we have decided that now is truly the high time to pay tribute and, of course, thank this generous gesture of the artist, and so a permanent exhibition began to be created. The latter takes us through his life and the main turning points of it in the first room with enlarged photographs, and we can also peek into the artist's virtual studio, which he had at Vošnjakova ulica 9 in Ljubljana. To complement the documentary work, screens have been added to the photo wall timeline of the artist's life, on which visitors can view numerous works by Miha Maleš, whose oeuvre we were unable to present due to the extensiveness of his work. The last two of the five gallery rooms are intended for the presentation of his extensive oeuvre. Maleš was originally a professional graphic artist. In his life, however, he tried his hand at numerous graphic techniques, in which he undoubtedly achieved enviable quality. The gallery thus stores over 1,600 graphic works alone.

At the end of 2024, we refreshed the permanent collection of the artist's works. In the first room, we can now view works from the artist's painting oeuvre – canvases with typical Maleš motifs of girls and women and the ever-living environment of Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, where the painter also had his first studio. The gallery's latest acquisition also has its place, namely the work The Fortune Teller, which belongs to Maleš's earlier period, a time when he mostly devoted himself to various graphic techniques. This work also reflects two crucially connected visual elements – line and color, which live in parallel in Maleš's art. Alongside the paintings from his youth and the artist's realistic period of the forties and fifties, we also present his fantastic, dreamy phase with the work Evening Games from 1970. The mature period around 1970, after the artist's visit to Spain, brings an even stronger color to his work, which is also clearly demonstrated by his aforementioned work. He gave this motif as a template for a tapestry to the master Etelka Tobolka, who embroidered the motif. This tapestry can also be seen at this year's permanent exhibition by the artist. The second exhibition space is represented by Maleš's painted ceramics. The latter is also a new acquisition, which the gallery acquired by purchasing it from the collection of the artist's daughter, Travica Maleš Grešak. The artist had already devoted himself to ceramics in 1935. The format of a graphic sheet or canvas was replaced by a circular shape. On the plates from the Schnabl ceramics workshop in Kamnik, his own image appears, followed by portraits of his future wife Olga and the motif of the artist's famous work A Memory of Venice, which he created in a slightly modified composition the following year (today in the permanent collection of the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana). A few years later, in 1939, he created a series of painted plates with depictions of national costumes, which he exhibited in Milan that same year, alongside his graphic works.

When Maleš returned from a trip to Western Europe in the mid-1950s, full of new ideas and inspiration, he once again devoted himself to ceramics. Artistic works filled plates, vases of various shapes, and also brooches and pendants for necklaces. This time, vibrant stylized figures, masks and faces from African and other primitive cultures, animal characters and local folklore came to the fore.

Along with ceramics, the artist's graphic work is also indispensable, which this time is designed as a palette of his work and encompasses different periods of the artist's work in terms of time, technique and motif.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r89Q1sKgwI&t=70s