Anja Jerčič Jakob
Baroque, 2014
egg tempera, oil, canvas

In her artistic creations, Anja Jerčič Jakob continues to captivate with her extraordinary ability to always direct her gaze towards the otherwise overlooked, marginal, for most people insignificant or even disruptive segments of nature. In recent years, her canvases have been preoccupied with neglected peripheries, weedy fields, overgrown and neglected thickets within forests and orchards. Even before that, for several years the central motif of her painting work was a marginal, overlooked plant, commonly treated as a weed in general view – the common clover. On her canvases, the clover was elevated as if it were the queen of the plant world, placed on a unique pedestal, albeit in a herbarized, and therefore post mortem form.

The monumental image of the herbarized clover on a large canvas is marked by a fundamentally multilayered nature of space. The floating, almost monstrously oversized plant windingly weaves its thin stems and roots through the space of the painting. Through the principle of layering and the oval form, a certain depth of space is achieved, just like in Baroque ceiling painting, while the flattened and fragile clover rendered as a monumental artistic creation resides in a state of levitation against the enigmatic dark canvas background. However, this depiction is not about creating an illusionistic space, instead, the visual field is defined by fluctuations and transitions between thin layers of the painting, as the images of intertwined roots, twisted stems, and flat leaves shift from the background to the foreground and vice versa. Despite its flatness, the herbarized plant as living tissue is omnipresent: the space of the painting is thus defined precisely by its multilayered character and the impossibility of determining a specific spatial plane.

The image on the canvas, in which Anja Jerčič Jakob transforms a part of the natural world into a painting, is an expression of her subjective vision, reflecting a spiritual sense of immaterial connectedness with the natural world.

Katarina Hergold Germ

Anja Jerčič Jakob (Slovenj Gradec, 1975) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in Ljubljana in 2000. She also completed her master’s degree in printmaking (2004) and painting (2007) there. She has received several awards, including the ALUO Award (2004) and the first prize at the 4^th Biennial of Small Format Paintings in Ljutomer (2006). Since 2016, she has been employed as an assistant professor of painting at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana. She also occasionally works on illustrations for children’s books. Her works are represented in many public collections. She lives and works in Ljubljana.