Tina Dobrajc is an established visual artist, known primarily for her paintings, but also for her work as an illustrator and set designer. Her works are characterised by an interweaving of tradition and contemporaneity, combining elements of Slovenian folklore and mythology with motifs from everyday life and pop culture. Through this interweaving, she raises various socially critical issues, focusing in particular on the problem of interpersonal relationships and the human relationship with nature.

In this exhibition, the artist presents new paintings in which she builds on her recognisable iconography and expands it with new additions. The central setting of her paintings is usually a wild (forest) landscape, which appears mysterious, dreamy and even mystical due to unnatural accents of colour and light. In the more recent paintings, extensions of civilisation, such as separate elements of infrastructure, isolated buildings, abandoned trampolines and playgrounds, become part of the landscape and almost make it seem like the edge of civilisation. The main protagonists of the paintings are always girls or young women, dressed in clothes from different eras and costumes, sometimes with carnival accessories, other times scantily clad, accompanied by native forest or domestic animals as their companions, cohorts and increasingly also allies. In older works, the figures are depicted frontally, their gaze is pointedly directed towards the viewer, and they are in the foreground of the painting, in front of the landscape as the space they shield with their bodies. In more recent works, however, they recede more and more into the background, becoming part of the landscape and sometimes even merging with it so that they are almost imperceptible. At the same time, their defensive stance intensifies, they become increasingly threatening and aggressive, or, on the contrary, they turn away from us indifferently in a return "back to nature". In the meantime, the atmosphere there has shifted – the extremes of the colour spectrum evoke an overwhelming sensation of either scorching heat or bone-chilling cold – the usual mystery and gloom are joined by an ominous sense of impending apocalypse.

From the relationships described between the figure and the landscape, it is clear that the latter represents their (perhaps unfriendly and dark, but familiar) living environment in the broadest sense of the word. If in the artist's older works the focus is on relationships within human society, which are always symptomatically expressed in the attitude towards young women, the more recent works show a shift in emphasis to humankind's relationship towards nature. These paintings reflect what becomes clearer with each passing day – we are standing on the edge of civilisation asking ourselves: Is that all there is?

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Tina Dobrajc (1984) received her BA and MA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She has presented her work in many solo exhibitions, including Ivan Grohar Gallery in Škofja Loka (2014), Božidar Jakac Gallery in Kostanjevica na Krki (2017), KiBela Gallery in Maribor (2018), City Art Gallery in Nova Gorica (2020), Kresija Gallery in Ljubljana (2020) and Miklova hiša Gallery in Ribnica (2022), as well as in numerous group presentations, the most prominent of which are Art Ex-Yu Biennial of Young Artists, Contemporary Art Centre of Montenegro (2018), Time Without Innocence, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana (2019), Returning the Gaze, Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2022) and The Figurative, Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2023). She lives and works in Škofja Loka.