RAVNIKAR GALLERY SPACE

Visual artist Maja Babič Košir, sculptor, and painter, curiously blurs the boundaries between mediums in her new series of artworks, which includes paintings, drawings and large-scale collages, as well as sculptural works and spatial installations. The artist’s intuitive creative process is, as always, anchored in a contemplative, introspective principle. Drawing material from her surroundings and her personal history, she translates each event of her inner world into a visual world in the cycle of impulsive artistic interventions, remaining faithful to a sensual and intense visual language and a raw, (seemingly) unpolished and wild aesthetic. Certain series from the recent years, such as the still ongoing processes of composing the collages entitled Love Letters Series, but also the series of explicit, raging monotypes, appear like emotional outbursts in diary form, precisely because of their narrative nature and reminiscence of letters. Particularly exciting are the Love Letters compilations that the artist began to create when she discovered a rich family archive of a wide variety of materials: envelopes, cardboard, colourful papers of different textures, shiny adhesive tapes, cut-out letters and other papers with visually appealing, tactile qualities.

Maja Babič Košir (1978) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where she also obtained her master’s degree in Sculpture. She completed her postgraduate studies in Creative Illustration and Visual Communication Techniques at EINA in Barcelona. She has participated in numerous solo and group shows, most notably in Portugal and Spain, where she lived and worked for almost 10 years. She won several awards and acknowledgments, and her works are housed in private and public collections. She lives and works between Porto and Ljubljana.

RAVNIKAR GALLERY is a contemporary art gallery dedicated to the presentation and promotion of visual culture by both Slovenian and international artists. We offer a diverse platform and a rich calendar of events to support established artists, while raising the profile of emerging young creatives who may just be making a name for themselves. The gallery has been run by its founder and director Piera Ravnikar since 2017. Since its inception, the vision of the gallery has been to showcase local art production and its integration with international trends through outward-facing activities. Our aim is to promote a dynamic and meaningful exchange between artists, curators, collectors and the general public through the development of international partnerships and local networks. RAVNIKAR GALLERY also nurtures a more specific thematic focus. The artists we represent broadly use their work to investigate, analyse and evaluate space. The exploration of architecture and spaces – whether physical or metaphorical – stays central to their work. We showcase the media of contemporary painting, drawing and sculpture with all their complex qualities and in all their unpredictable forms. The focus on the semantics of space is most clearly expressed in our new project space, R SPACE, which opened in September 2021 in collaboration with the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). The gallery was also central to the foundation of Ljubljana Art Weekend, an international platform which is being developed in cooperation with the Cukrarna and the City of Ljubljana. The initiative, like its European counterparts, is committed to the appropriate presentation and promotion of contemporary visual art.