Uroš Weinberger is a well-established visual artist on the Slovenian art scene and beyond, who is primarily concerned with figurative painting, mainly creating paintings, drawings and murals, occasionally also installations.

His works are always made in response to current social events and he is particularly interested in the relationship between reality and fiction. Within this framework, he explores one way or another of constructing reality in the context of various ideologies, political or economic interests, and scientific and technological achievements. This research, as everyday life increasingly takes place in a computer environment and on the Internet, has recently led him to create virtual worlds in which there are no longer any fixed boundaries between reality and fiction, and the distinction between the two is completely arbitrary. The process of creating Weinberger’s paintings has been the same for years. For his works, the artist usually uses already existing images from contemporary communication media such as various publications (newspapers, magazines), television and the Internet, or specialist and art literature and film. He tears images out of their original context and assembles them into new wholes (digital collage), which he then transfers to medium- or large-format canvases. He uses different painting techniques, often on the same canvas. In his earlier works (2008–2013) he often combined nebulous areas of colour in the background with drawn figures in the foreground, while around 2015 one and the other gradually began to crumble, until, in the most recent works (2018–2022), this dissolved into a completely “pixelated” world – here, figures with more or less blurred silhouettes stand in a space of nebulous colour dots and dashes, which in some places combine to form recognisable landscape elements such as apartment blocks or trees, and in other places fantastic grid structures or spaceships. In this world, it is not entirely clear where and when the figures merge into space (and vice versa), because everything is permeated by the same fluid matter and the unreal, luminous light that reminds us of a computer screen, which is why we associate it with the virtual.

On this occasion, the exhibition focuses on the virtual, which is already announced by the title Metaverse. (According to Wikipedia, the term is made up of the prefix meta and the word universe and refers to a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection.) In it, Weinberger presents works in which we only find images from real life here and there, since spaces with unusual growth, condensed atmosphere and glowing light are inhabited by figures in spacesuits whose faces we do not see, who are busy with tasks whose purpose we do not understand. Are these people in a distant future? Or in a distant space? Are these perhaps the avatars who represent us in virtual worlds? And if so, is their virtual world our potential or just virtual reality?

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Uroš Weinberger (1975) holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. He continued his studies at the Academy in Sofia, Bulgaria, and participated in artist residencies in Berlin and Freising. He has received several awards and recognitions for his work, including the Student Prešeren Award (2001) and the Recognition Award for Significant Artworks of the University of Ljubljana (2018). He lives and works as an independent visual artist in Ljubljana.
http://urosweinberger.com/