RAVNIKAR GALLERY SPACE
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Visual artist Maja Babic Kosir, sculptor, painter and illustrator, 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. As always, the artist's intuitive creative process is anchored in the contemplative, introspective principle, or, as she explains it, your story is your gold. Drawing material from her surroundings and her personal history, in an impulsive, almost uncontrolled cycle of artistic interventions, she translates each event of her inner world into a visual world, remaining faithful to a sensual and intense visual language and a raw, (seemingly) unpolished and wild aesthetic. The artworks are thus a document of the artist herself in a specific moment and space. Certain series from the recent years, such as the still ongoing processes of composing the collages entitled Love Letters, 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.

She also continues with her new series Gold dust pours from a torn pocket in a similar language. From the production, which began in the isolation of a hotel room, when the artist was stuck abroad last year, it is clear that Babič Košir has a background in sculpture. The desire to expand into the space is clearly indicated by the installations, which attempt to at least partially deny the decorativeness and two-dimensionality of the collages and paintings, even if they are not very flat, as they achieve a multidimensional effect through the layering and stacking of materials. Although the saturation from the artist's past creative periods may have become more refined and individual pictorial components as well as overall compositions are now more clearly defined, the artist does not strive for perfection; she even welcomes a certain shabbiness, mistakes that are not mistakes, or, as she says, rubbish and poetry. Consequently, this is how she also investigates the plasticity of the material and its sensory dimensions. In the creative aspect, her interventions are minimalistic: she always submits to the recycled material she finds – either in the family archive or on her travels – (stones, textiles), uses it as she finds it, composes it with no or very few interventions into a new whole, whose new charge is now completely detached from the meanings that the individual materials may have carried before.