Curriculum vitae
Duša Jesih was born in 1977 in Ljubljana. She completed the Secondary School of Design and Photography in Ljubljana (majoring in graphic design) in 1996. In 2003, she graduated in painting from the College for Visual Arts, and obtained a specialisation in 2006. Between 2006 and 2007 she furthered her studies at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. She enrolled in the Master’s programme in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in 2012. She has held several solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group and curated exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. She has won several awards at the International Painting Ex-tempore Festival in Piran and Ptuj, and in 2015 received the ALUO Prešeren Award.Duša Jesih and New Geometry
Duša Jesih is one of the few Slovenian artists attentive to the fact that the legacy of constructed art is far from being depleted. This orientation, an optimistic, colourful and conceptually clear tendency, has never been gladly approved of within the context of the Slovenian sentiments of ‘pain and suffering’ – let us recall a veritable ‘pogrom’ sustained nearly a century ago by Avgust Černigoj at the hands of the local critics in Ljubljana –, while from an international perspective this orientation is one of the key parameters of modernist discourse. Constructivism, suprematism and the ensuing art movements have become a synonym for an alternative perception of art, its functions and relationship to reality. Op-art, kinetic art, new tendencies and the more recent neo-geo with Peter Halley as probably the most prominent contemporary artist are still a source of inspiration to younger artists who see an alternative to the present-day chaotic world at the intersection of rationality and sensuality or in that utopic concept of an artwork that was the aim of historical avant-gardes.
The recent paintings of Duša Jesih are prime examples of the new geometry, a subjective combination of formal exactness and distinctive expressivity of chromatic paint applications, with which the artist ‘challenges’ the strict rationalism in constructing a pictorial field. The alternation of colours – in the case of the featured work the interchange of red and black on a white background –, together with the juxtaposition of rectangular forms, invests the pictures with the requisite dynamism and tension, thus animating the painted surfaces and sensitising their perception. In spite of the widely established notion suggesting that painting of the geometrical type is inherently cold and insensitive, Jesih’s works stand as proof to the contrary: both form and colour contain an immanent emotional charge. In continual interaction, this charge is thematised and contextualised in a symbolic dialogue between explicit and implicit evocations that reflect interhuman relationships, their permutations and different intensities of their oscillations. In the painting process, the grid-like structure, whose basic elements are a square, a circle and a triangle, follows the artist’s concurrent psychological impulses, unpredictable impetuses that can generate, from the same basic components, invariably different pictorial solutions. Enhanced through colour into autonomous visual entities, these pictorial representations yield themselves to different interpretations, each viewer will perceive and embrace them differently, not necessarily in accordance with the original artistic intention and eventual realisation. Separating and linking colour surfaces within geometrical modules presents an aesthetic norm without preordained ‘natural’ models emulated or (re)interpreted by traditional painting, although geometric shapes are to be found in nature, indubitably the norm for those of Jesih’s works that are difficult to discern with the naked eye (crystals, microscopically small structures) or tend to be identified as the principle of more complex formations and phenomena. The aesthetics of geometrism that defines the oeuvre of Duša Jesih finds its theoretical basis in “Gestalt”, a concept according to which all forms, even the simplest ones, are carriers of a certain meaning and thus will never be neutral or self-sufficent, which is ultimately substantiated by the rich history of symbolic meanings of individual shapes, which various cultures and ideologies interpreted in different ways, occasionally even acquiring diametrically opposed connotations. Whatever applies to shapes also applies to colours, which either interact with the shapes or function independently as abstract notions. Visual language as an open system of signs thus constitutes an inexhaustible source of inspiration for nonverbal communication. Brane Kovič
Curriculum vitae
Duša Jesih was born in 1977 in Ljubljana. She completed the Secondary School of Design and Photography in Ljubljana (majoring in graphic design) in 1996. In 2003, she graduated in painting from the College for Visual Arts, and obtained a specialisation in 2006. Between 2006 and 2007 she furthered her studies at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. She enrolled in the Master’s programme in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in 2012. She has held several solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group and curated exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. She has won several awards at the International Painting Ex-tempore Festival in Piran and Ptuj, and in 2015 received the ALUO Prešeren Award.
