7th Exhibition of paintings by Jože Kumer: Tense bow

Jože Kumer presents a series of painting works entitled Tense Bow in the Gallery of the New University in Ljubljana. Kumer’s motif is also this time based on a myth, a reflection, even a tribute to the female anthropomorphic image as the primary starting point of all creation. It originates from the traditional depiction of the character of a woman, the bearer of the elemental essence, but with a reflection on today’s socio-critical topics and controversies. From this title, mother nature, earth, water, existence, but also war, transience and ephemerality become involved in the works. His works thus include reflection on our today and tomorrow.

The author has remained faithful to his own color dynamics and object form for more than forty years. As Marijan Tršar wrote about him already in the 1990s, Kumer’s emancipation of color stems from solid realistic foundations. The merging of the abstract figural of colored surfaces is based on an understanding of the materiality of matter, which can be perceived in him both in sculptural and present works of art, which results in a plastic treatment of the object’s shape transferred to the image field.

The design of the exhibition is bipolar. While on the one hand we are accompanied by the blue phase of the author, the blue of young memory in the figural, the symbolism of water and Krka, which provided the author with the background of his childhood, the other part leans towards a more solid base of warm earthy colors. The color blue represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration and sensitivity. Therefore, it is not surprising that we are accompanied in blue by works with the motif of the Dangerous Kiss, Sail in the city and Resistance for clean water. Brown tones as stability and reliability are mixed with red energy and green harmony. These earthy tones pass into pure abstraction, and the series finally ends with an image of the author’s original city – Novo mesto.

 

About the author

Jože Kumer was born in 1953 in Novo mesto, where he later attended primary and secondary school, and graduated in painting from prof. Andrej Jemec and Prof. Milan Butina at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Ljubljana in 1981. He worked for six years as an art pedagogue at the Center of Secondary Technical Schools in Novo mesto, but then decided to become an independent cultural worker in the field of painting, sculpture and illustration. Today he lives and creates in Dolenjske Toplice, where he also led and organized sculpture colonies for many years.

doc. dr. Ines Vodopivec