Iva Tratnik (SI)

Blue V. V., 2017
textile collage on hardboard
300 x 300 cm

Art works by Iva Tratnik employ a variety of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, video, textiles, installations, etc., and stretch across different fields of artistic practice, including performance, contemporary dance, and theater. Once these layers of creativity melt into a single piece of art, highly individual works are created, which embrace and transform the entire exhibition space into a consistent, personal, and highly original artistic expression beyond comparison. The eruption of gesture transcends the specifics of the individual exhibited elements, shifting from one form to another, from walls to paintings, from drawings to digital screen; appearing as a collage or performance; jumping from static to dynamic narrative, and yet remaining faithful to the subject matter, and captivating in terms of the complexity of its concept.

The artist's particular becomes universal, once we accept that we have stepped inside a monumental, all-encompassing and complete unified environment, and that we ourselves are weaving the threads of interpersonal relationships as explored by the art works.

In terms of both form and space, there is an inner dynamics that unfolds in front of us, 'pasting' and separating visual elements into the painting at the same time, layering them to form a uniform artistic landscape, and labeling them with individual titles, which through a highly original, unique, and typical artist's mark, place Iva Tratnik into a fully autonomous, recognizable and specific position, which is difficult to compare to anything found on the Slovene or even global art scene. It feels as though we are witnessing a continuous battle of ideas, representations and urges, which suddenly find themselves together in one place, co-existing and living inside a seeming reality, when the artist wants them to. Iva Tratnik not only pours herself into her works; she internalizes the world around her and creates other worlds from it, a multitude of worlds, actually, through which she attempts to embrace the entire human history, and offer it to us in an autochthonous futuristic 'disguise' – about which we soon notice that it is different, that something does not fit, that it is distorted and, of course, metaphysical: what happens is a kind of a palimpsest collage inside a (skillfully) erased reality.

Iva Tratnik is an academy-trained painter, who has introduced a kind of an 'uneasy freshness' to the (Slovene) art scene: the primary beauty of her works enchants us, and yet, it is but a trompe-l'œil that tricks the eye, while at the same time a complex, extensive, intense structure is established, merging together large oil and acrylic canvases, drawings, textiles, collages, photographic and video portraits, and sculptures and installations mostly made from recycled materials – to put on a unique, one-of-a-kind show for the audience in various media.

Iva Tratnik (b. 1980, Slovenia) graduated in 2006 and received her Master's degree in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Ljubljana in 2012. Today she works as a self-employed artist, experimenting with different artistic practices. In 2015 she was one of the chosen to represent Slovenia at the Expo in Milan, in 2017 she showcased her work at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Celje.