Žiga Okorn - Revealings

After the Secondary School of Design and Photography, Žiga Okorn continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1991 under prof. Gustav Gnamuš and prof. Tomaž Brejc. Since 1994 he has been working as a freelance artist. He is a co-author of the renovation of former military prisons into the Celica youth hotel and the author of one of the cells, for which he received a plaque from the City of Ljubljana in 2004 with the Sestava group. He is also involved in the design and staging of exhibitions, illustration, photography, and interior design. Since 1991, he has been regularly exhibiting his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures at home and abroad. In 2002, he received the award for best watercolor at Extempore Piran and in 2008 at Extempore Grožnjan. In 2009 he received the Golden Nest Award, and in 2006, 2008 and 2011 he was a co-author of the Golden Pencil Award of the Architectural Chamber of Slovenia. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

»… Žiga’s search for the essential element of human existence, that is, love for oneself and one’s fellow human beings, takes place on the whiteness of the sheet, on which, with minimal artistic means, human figures are born as if from some invisible space in the shades of flesh that merge with life – water. Recently, the figure has increasingly grown into intense color landscapes that glow in warm red tones – and yet this is not only beautiful, we can also understand them quite the opposite, as the horror of fiery teeth. Landscapes in which the figures of a woman, child or couple almost stand still dictate the true grandeur of nature and, as in romantic painting, highlight the individual, his smallness and perishability, but at the same time, by constantly highlighting it, the painter gives the meaning that a person or human life should occupy in the minds of the entire society. The painter’s spaces are mostly taken from nature, we could say that in them we perceive both a real existing space and an abstract one, in some places it seems that the two meet and thus create a mystical mood. In Žiga’s painting, I cannot resist the designation that his art is actually the true successor of romanticism, combining both a loving image and an image of suffering and darkness, which is dictated to him by contemporary society and its increasingly distorted view of prescribed moral and ethical norms. And if we touch on the Romantic period, when artists fled from the horrors of time into a world of pleasant or dark content, Žiga Okorn is a neo-romantic who, with deep respect for man and nature, anxiously follows the slow separation of both, but at the same time also catches rays of light in the darkness. ” (from the exhibition note, curator Saša Bučan)