The Final Frontier

Adrijan Praznik, The Final Frontier, 2014, digital collage, transfer and acrylic on canvas, 250 x 170 cm

Photo: Arne Brejc / © Adrijan Praznik 

"Adrijan Praznik’s monumental works deal with the issue of contemporary artistic gesture as fundamentally mediated in an original way (his paintings are produced as digital prints transferred onto prepared canvas, a process that renders authorship questionable or relative). In subject matter, his works explicitly refer to media images from popular culture, the mass media, and B film production, i.e. images that are seen as visually attractive and spectacular on the one hand, and on the other, as cheap, mass produced, ephemeral, exchangeable, and kitschy. As such they represent symptomatic images of our contemporary collective imagery, elevated and fixed in the pictorial field by the artist’s complex procedure, which, paradoxically, incites fascination with and distance from the historically eminent status of painting as a medium."

- by Martina Vovk, PhD, for the exhibition Time without innocence in Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana