A Look 7 – The seventh biennial exhibition “A Look at Slovenian Visual Arts at Home and Across the Borderline: Totally Fresh”
Božidar Jakac Gallery, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia
10. 10. 2014 – 17. 11. 2014
City Gallery Nova Gorica, Slovenia
9. 1. 2015 – 30. 1. 2015
Center for Contemporary Art, Celje, Slovenia
9. 4. – 17. 5. 2015
Katja Felle uses painting for transforming the media images that surround us. The frequent topic of media images and media aesthetics in the work of the younger and middle-aged generation of the Slovenian artists is marking the importance and impact of the visual world which is communicated by the mass media onto the field of art.
Katja Felle puts the contemporary visual language of mass media in the centre of her explorations and thematises the influence it has on people. As motifs in her paintings we come across dismembered images, fragments of human silhouettes and inscriptions – lively coloured surfaces which resemble digital interferences in live broadcasting. These dismembered images communicate two different stories, on one hand, one can interpret them as the artists’ desire to disintegrate the myth of perfect images imposed on us by mass media, and on the other hand, as an association of the decomposing of the individual’s attention span, which is, because of the aggressive and imposed media images, becoming ever more fragmented. Media images that appear in its original environment as pure and perfect, are in Katja Felle’s paintings only partial. In her work one can detect and interlude between that what is controlled and that what is a mistake. Sometimes otherwise precisely drawn images and colour compositions lose their sharpness in certain areas, and the artist allows herself even ”dripping”.
These fragmented images, which can be associated with the human memory, are telling us a story of the world of images which is lacking any substance. Images she is creating appear layered and mixed, they cover each other up, achieving the effect wanted by the artist to cause visual impulses, often with no content.
Contrary to the disintegrated images, indicating a degradation of the media memory, the artist, in an exceptionally disciplined manner, creates images in paintings and exactly that precision in her technique creates the tension between her method and an organized chaos which can be detected by the viewer.
Andreja Hribernik