Curator
Arjan Pregl's artistic practice extends into the social space, using and critically reflecting on the various media available to him. Pregl reflects on his role in society and develops critical, political and resistance strategies throughout his work. In the field of painting, he builds an open, internally contradictory, heteronomous and multi-layered structure based on the mutual tension of visual, and sometimes textual and conceptual fragments. Thus, the paintings in A Five-Minute Revolution also include the possibilities of technical production and image manipulation that have had a strong impact on the structure of his painting process. The structure of the painting field is based on photographic models of two formally and ideologically oppositely positioned public monuments by Drago Tršar, from which Pregl removed the monuments and placed an appropriately enlarged decorative hobby sculpture in their place. By doing so, the technical reproduction did not exclude manual work, as the paintings are created with the traditional techniques of pencil and oil on canvas, but in the new context the meaning and role of these processes have changed considerably. Replacing emotionally and polemically intensely saturated monuments with banal abstract colourful masses made from modelling mass critically and ironically captures the aesthetic relativism and political revisionism of the time and space in which we live.
Arjan Pregl (1973) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 1998. In 2001, he obtained his master's degree in painting at the same institution. He attended IUP Indiana University of Pennsylvania (USA) in the last semester of his master's degree. He then enrolled in a master's degree in graphics, completing it in 2004. He works in the fields of painting, graphics, illustration, and design. He has received several awards for his work. Pregl lives and works in Ljubljana.
