Women Artists in the KGLU Collection

In both Slovenian and international cultural spaces, there is an abundance of extraordinary women artists. However, they still represent only a fraction in the art collections, despite the institutional efforts from museums and galleries for a more equal presentation of their works in recent years. Since 1963, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška held art exhibitions of women artists traditionally on the 8th of March, International Women’s Day. The last such exhibition was the Biennial of Yugoslav Female Artists in 1988. Although we do not wish to categorize art on a gender basis, only 17 percent of women are currently included in the KGLU Collection. Nature is the common motif that links the four presented artists this time.

Ida Brišnik Remec (1941) is this year’s recipient of the Glazer Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Maribor. Already in the 1970s, she became interested in the metamorphoses of the plant world, a theme to which she has remained faithful to this day, initially mainly in acrylic technique, but later also in drawing.

Vida Slivniker (1945) originates from the colourist tradition and builds the content of her works on how she experiences nature, which has inspired her in many ways throughout various stages of her life. She depicted motifs of nature in both figurative form and abstraction.

Anja Jerčič Jakob (1975) has elevated the common clover to a pedestal. To many, an insignificant plant, even a weed, becomes a metaphor for survival in her works, illuminating that even what we leave to nature, no matter how marginal, has its own life.

Lucija Stramec (1978) devotes herself to the overlooked details in nature, where she finds interesting compositions of branches, roots, undergrowth, and other elements. Individual details of a larger motif make up the whole picture, with trees, trunks, and branches being motifs that simultaneously remind us of our mortality and promote humanity’s ecological conscience.