Rok Zelenko - The colorfulness of everyday life

Rok Zelenko (1951) was born into a family of artists: father Karel Zelenko (1925) is a graphic artist, sculptor, ceramicist and illustrator, mother Sonja Rauter (1918–2010) was a sculptor. He spent his childhood in Kamnik, later the family moved to the Ljubljana settlement of Trnovo. When his parents rented a house in Grožnjan in Istra, he set foot in this town for the first time, which marked him forever.

In 1975, he graduated from the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 1977, he became a member of the Association of Slovenian Fine Artists, and the following year he exhibited for the first time independently in the Gallery Bežigrad in Ljubljana. He had many solo exhibitions (over 130) and participated in many group exhibitions at home and around the world. He and his wife Leonida Bernetič also opened the Porton gallery in Grožnjan, where they live, soon after their wedding. Rok Zelenko is also a member of ULUPUH and the Croatian Association of Visual Artists on Rijeka, the secretary of the Grožnjan Association of Art, Cultural and Public Workers, and in 1989 he also became the president of the artistic council of the Fonticus city gallery in Grožnjan. In 2000, he participated in the projects of the artistic group Hermetic Chromatism. He and his colleague Giampietro Vianello Casisa conceived the Archeology of the Future exhibition cycle, which is still in constant development to this day. Rok Zelenko lives and creates in Grožnjan.

Curator Saša Bučan in the exhibition catalogue: “…The motif in the foreground of Zelenka’s painting is a man who represents to the artist a traveller in time, caught in a moment, he can appear from the artist’s real life, from a memory or simply from a dream. Zelenka is characterized by the clearly defined artistic language of classical painting, where exceptional color plays a big role; this in itself represents the author, who was marked by a living space surrounded by sun, freshness and light, which in itself emits an invigorating energy.”