iFollowing a major retrospective exhibition of works from Miro Hajnc’s artistic legacy held in 2025 at the Carinthian Gallery of Fine Arts in Slovenj Gradec, a permanent exhibition of selected pieces from his “Opus Alchymicum” series has been on display since September 2026 in the attic of the Radlje ob Dravi Manor. This immersive installation—featuring a large central image of the Sun and monumental drawings—is dedicated to the four elements of all creation: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. These are introduced by Hajnc’s landscapes depicting the world along the Drava River and the wooded slopes of the Pohorje and Kozjak ranges, thereby linking the exhibition to the manor’s central museum display, which is dedicated to the forestry heritage of engineer Franjo Pahernik.
Curator: Marko Košan.

Miro Hajnc was a reclusive painter, who, in the silence of his studio (and to music) or secluded in nature, indulged in the contemplative exploration of the primal images of the universal truths of the world.

Although much too early, he wove his creative efforts into a coherent corpus, composed of rounded and imaginative cycles, in which the elemental life force is always placed at the center, just as it is always put to the test in the whirlpools of knowledge.

Miro Hajnc’s painterly meditation was fueled by the “memory” of man’s presence in and with nature, which is not only the smell of fresh moss on a stone in the middle of a stream, where it is watered by turbulent rapids, nor merely listening to the gentle opening of fern leaves and seeds with a message from ancient times, but also a delicate flirtation with man’s innate perception of the spiritual dimensions of existence with the ever-present foreboding of the end… and perhaps of continuation in the world of shadows, where matter is transformed into eternal spiritual energy, even if it lives on only in the memory of those who remain and those who come.

The images of pristine nature are the same and always different in countless repetitions, like a thread of fragile texture of Zen-like muted ideas about the phenomenological structure of the visible world, until in the Fern and Door cycles from the late nineties the contours and brushstrokes blossom into undulating lines that breathe their own rhythm into the images. They then found their special expression in the monumental drawings from the last creative years, which represent the core of the rounded Opus Alchymicum project, and finally in the Exodos cycle, which moves the images into the space of the intangible Beyond.

Miro Hajnc was a curious wanderer on the path to the state of Oneness, his true self… He strove to become a “seer”… he tore apart the senses that show a false picture of the world and obstruct the path to the transcendent, he shook off visual “rhymes” and preferred to use artistic “assonances” instead, and by capturing the symbols of the collective consciousness from the archetypal world, he peeled away personal commitment with a single goal – to discover the true alchemy of images.