Ravnikar Gallery Space
Ljubljana (SI)

Curator:
Piera Ravnikar

Jun 30, 2023 - Sep 06, 2023

Mental Health Walk

From crisis to crisis, we hear more and more that we are experiencing "unprecedented" challenges and times of extreme uncertainty, but for Millennials, who have been hearing these phrases for at least 15 years, they are becoming a bit tiresome. How does this generation-defining anxiousness regarding just about everything that feels alienating and intimate, yet so universal, translate into the visual world of Ivana Bajec?

Ivana Bajec's new solo exhibition, suggestively titled Mental Health Walk, is in many ways a product of the Coronavirus era, a so-called Corona baby. At a time when one crisis follows another and people collectively, yet privately, dedicate themselves to improving their physical and mental health, Bajec has created her own, almost satirical version of a walk, which she has translated into the act of painting. This proved to be the most effective break and release of her pent-up energy. The present exhibition, created in the painter's distinctive language and summer pastel colour palette, is a combination of abstract and figurative elements, neatly, almost comic-book-like, bordered. The painter's pared-down paintings, based on the templates of her drawings, serve as a window into her mental and emotional state over the last few years, and thus into the intricacies of our consumption of news, media and wider internet culture in general.

Despite the graver tone of the exhibition's title, the show is anything but a social commentary; it is not a response to or a reflection of current events, but an independent record of the artist's everyday life at a specific moment in time. By merging abstract forms with recognisable symbols from the internet landscape and shared real-life experiences, her paintings celebrate the immediacy and viral nature of online content, while offering a fresh perspective on the cultural phenomena that shape our daily lives. Viewers will recognise themselves and their world in the humorous images. Without delving too deeply into deciphering the images of a dolphin with a red cardboard box, a seagull with a slice of pizza and the iconic Jennifer Coolidge, it is easy to see that the collected artworks are less a reference to the somewhat tired contemporary malaise alluded to in the exhibition title, but rather, in the artist's own words, a redemptive call to "Girls just wanna have fun!”.

I click and I lick, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm

Guardian, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm

Flippy in the rain, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Flippy in metaverse, mixed media on canvas, 78 x 55 cm

Jennifer, mixed media on canvas, 180 x 150 cm

Me IRL, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 130 cm

Dolphin says no, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Ivana Bajec

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