Zora Stančič Commission

In her work, visual artist Zora Stančič explores graphics and graphic techniques. Her work is playful, experimental, and its material side is just as important as its content. Her studio is a testament to her rich opus and her boundless joy for everything new. The joy of new experiments, new discoveries, new matrices, always new prints, with new adjustments, new avenues, and new compositions that lead to new discoveries, new realisations, new experiments. It’s what makes her process her own and what she in fact likes to emphasise when talking about her work. However, it’s something we notice long before she points it out.

In Commission, her new exhibition, Zora Stančič offers a different kind of insight into her work and the specific nature of creating commissioned work. It represents an opportunity, a challenge, the possibility of creating something new for a residential house and its occupants who want to surround themselves with beauty. Pleasant, yet with plenty of room for conflict – first and foremost for the artist. This is not her first commission, and she finds herself wondering about the significance of such work and how to approach it. In her own way, of course. But what to make of its place in the life of the patron? How much of oneself does one put into the commissioned work, what does one actually give the patron? These were far from easy questions for the artist – her diverse oeuvre consists of equally diverse works inspired by her vigilance and constant exploration of the medium of graphic art.

Naturally, commissioned work comes with its own limitations and stipulations. The first limitation undoubtedly concerns finance. The fee determines the direction in which the work will go and what it will ultimately be – or at least what it won’t be. The second factor concerns space, although it is not solely constraining. It gives the artist the opportunity to create a work of art for a particular space that is still in the process of forming, to imagine the artwork occupying the space with all its unrealised potential, which is relatively freeing. If it is a burden, it is not a typical one.

At the onset, the artist knew the graphic print will be large. She therefore imagined the interplay of matrices and textures, their prints, at a larger scale, magnified, imbuing the work with a new kind of dynamics. After a number of tries, which can be admired at the exhibition, she printed several dashed round compositions of different colours on large, equally colourful canvases. One was chosen by the client, while those remaining are both part of the process and its goal, as well as something in-between. They represent a window into the final artwork. While they are part of the artist’s process, they took a different path and obeyed different parameters. They contain several layers of circumstances and facts, second thoughts, reflections, and – once again – experiments.

The artwork, which is now where it was supposed to be from the start, can also be imagined as a window. Large, with a noticeably soft character, containing printed lines that give it a kind of transparency and remind us of light when it reflects from the undulating sea or a river, or the dynamics of the setting sun, seen through blinds – if we indulge in a bit of poetic imagery as a way of wishing the commissioned print all the best in its new home and the artist many playful, unburdened experiments and prints.

– Ajda Ana Kocutar