Nika Rupnik is a visual artist of the younger generation, who works in the fields of painting, printmaking, drawing and installation. Her work explores themes of contemporary life marked by an oversaturation of (visual) information, fast pace and constant change, evoking feelings of overwhelm, alienation, fragility and transience. In keeping with this, images of abstracted structures often appear in her works in which elements of the urban landscape (buildings, architectural details, stone walls and cobblestones) are interwoven with organic fragments (patches of grass, bushes and parts of plants or animals), making it difficult to tell whether the worlds depicted are decaying or just emerging.

The artist also depicts this borderline situation formally by frequently combining classical painting and printmaking techniques with contemporary methods and materials. For instance, she integrates photography and photocopying into painting and employs the drypoint technique in printmaking on acrylic glass or plastic film. Central to all these processes is light, which the artist regards as a co-creator of her works since it does not only appear indirectly as one or another kind of luminous notation, but also directly, as the creator of a shadow drawing that emerges through the transposition of the transparent support, sometimes enhanced by the use of artificial light such as reflectors, battery operated torches, etc. The works produced in this manner create a sense of the inimitable moment and an atmosphere imbued with feelings of the fleeting, intangible and elusive, by which the artist captures the instability and fluidity of today’s living environment and the powerlessness of the individual who lives in it.

This also applies to the exhibition Contra Plan, in which the artist plays with the transformation of drawing. In the first space, she offers us an insight into her drawing oeuvre with a selection of representative works. This is followed in the main space by colour drawings on acrylic glass, which are reflected on the wall behind and in which we can participate ourselves with the help of available lighting in a play of contrasts between colour and grey, line and blotch, drawing and projection. In the last space, the artist presents monochrome drawings on acrylic glass, which she also treats as graphic matrices, and their corresponding prints on paper. The exhibition as a whole thus takes us from drawing per definitionem to drawing reflected by light in a fluid image on the wall, to drawing printed in a solid graphic image on paper.

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Nika Rupnik (1991) graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. During her studies, she furthered her knowledge in the field of printmaking at the Winchester School of Art in the UK. She has presented her work in several solo exhibitions, including Feng Shui (Kapsula, Ljubljana, 2017), Structure (Layerjeva hiša, Kranj, 2022) and Space of Play (artKIT, Kibla, Maribor, 2022), as well as in numerous group presentations in Slovenia and abroad. She also works as a set designer, an illustrator and an art pedagogue. She is self-employed in culture. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
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