From Wednesday, 18 June to Saturday, 19 July, the Bogenšperk Castle Gallery hosted an exhibition of artworks by the academic painter Lojze Adamljet, one of the greatest surrealist painters in Slovenia, who through his graphic art, illustration, painting and cultural activities made a strong mark on the Slovenian cultural and artistic space.
Lojze Adamlje, born in 1955, spent his youth in Šentvid pri Stični, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana he specialised in art printmaking on metal matrices under Professor Mark Pogačnik. In the following years, he successfully transferred the art of surrealism, which had already fascinated him during his studies, into painting and printmaking, and became one of our most prominent painters, a representative of pure surrealism and at the same time an artistic personality in his own right. In addition to painting and printmaking, he is also active in design, illustration and journalism. During his time at the Delo journalistic and graphic company, he was active in the field of culture and fine arts, organised numerous exhibitions at the Cicero Gallery – the art exhibition space of the Delo newspaper house – and was involved in the activities of the Association of Cultural Societies of Ljubljana – for two terms as its president. Almost three decades ago, he published the Golden Palette project, which was adopted by the Public Fund of the Republic of Slovenia as the highest evaluation model in the field of amateur artistic creation. To date, he has had 46 major solo exhibitions and participated in more than 330 group exhibitions – at home and abroad, as well as in many painting colonies. He has won several national and international awards for painting and graphic art. The most important of them is the small grand prix for his surrealist work from 2001, which he received at the World Exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
Exhibition reviewer Mag. Ana Kocjančič wrote about the exhibited works, among other things: ‘… The viewer senses the space in the apparent visual arrangement of Adamljet’s dream worlds and interprets, experiences and reflects on it with the help of figures and symbolic signs. With a powerful illusion, he quickly traps us, the viewers, in his world and slowly reveals to us grand, anecdotal stories through the sign Olympus. In imaginary spaces, he gives us a glimpse of personal iconography. His self-portraits are interesting in this respect, for example the image in the exhibition when Adamlje decides to hold up a mirror to himself in a new time and space, and rests on a rope high above the ground, among the cool high-rises of a modern metropolis, sitting on his bicycle at the moments when he is most catching his balance. Similarly, the elephant on a sphere, depicted on his bicycle, struggles with balance.”