Sonja Vulpes is a visual artist working in printmaking, drawing and artistic publications. Her work explores her inner self and is marked by uncompromising and brutal honesty, regardless of what worlds this may lead her to. As a result, her works are mostly a variety of self-portraits where personal testimony and emotional expression come to the fore.

In the exhibition Cake, the artist presents her latest graphic works, in which she continues to explore her inner emotional states. The starting point of the exhibition is her memories of birthday celebrations with cake and flowers from the garden, which for her represent intimate rituals of love, unadulterated happiness and boundlessness. The artist uses these memories as a bridge to reconnect with feelings lost and forgotten in adulthood. She focuses on the cake (or the flowers) as the main motif, which is both an emblem of the celebration as such and a metaphor for the positive feelings that are somehow taken for granted in childhood, but are lost in adulthood amidst everyday obligations, worries and problems. These feelings need to be rediscovered, recognised, accepted and nurtured. The first step on this path is self-love.

The artist embarks on an introspective journey of self-love through two graphic series that are connected and complement each other. In screen prints, she uses self-portrait photographs with a cake and flowers as a basis and then complements them with drawn elements and statements that act as an affirmation of the positive feelings captured in the image. In series of collagraphs, she goes a step further by combining the typical imagery of a cake or its distinct parts (e.g. icing, a slice, a crown) with figurative elements to create a depiction of someone, who is literally imbued with feelings of self-acceptance, love and respect, celebrating her own self.

By presenting both series together, the artist creates a dialogue between the past and the present, childhood and adulthood, memories and the present self, through which she seeks to rediscover her lost sense of wholeness, while also offering the viewer a reflection on the meaning of self-love within the complexity of contemporary society.

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Sonja Vulpes, whose real name is Sonja Grdina (1986), graduated in Art Pedagogy from the Faculty of Education – University of Ljubljana. Her work has been shown in the solo exhibitions Memento mori at Hiša kulture in Pivka (2018), Bittersweet at Daeppen Gallery in Basel (2018) and Limbo at MGLC in Ljubljana (2021), as well as in several group shows in Slovenia and abroad. In 2022, she was nominated for the Queen Sonja Print Award (Norway). Her practice is split between her studio in the Karst and her residence in Ljubljana.

Special thanks to Peter Fettich / KELA Ljubljana (film developing) and Leon Zuodar (screen printing).