The academy-trained painter and versatile artist Iva Tratnik expresses herself through a variety of artistic genres, from textile collage and oil on canvas to sculpture, installations, and performance. She received her master’s degree in painting at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2012, and she has worked as a freelance artist ever since.
The majority of her works comprise large oil paintings, fabric collages, portraits, drawings, rubber artefacts, light installations, and other types of installations. She has jointly created works with painter Marko Jakše and also appeared in dance, butoh, and other performances and multimedia improvisations.
Tratnik draws her ideas from the external world and connects them with events, objects, and forms she finds interesting. She expresses her responses through sophisticated artwork characterized by imaginative elements transitioning into real ones. Her works combine unusual topics, which are even heart-rending in places, with attractive artistic execution characterized by body geometry, disregard for complex composition in perspective, and heavy contour drawing that gives an impression of plastically carved figures. She thus introduces certain features to the oil technique that can be attributed to the artistic play typical of fabric collages, where, on the one hand, clear colour surfaces overlap and, on the other hand, they create spaces that only serve as the collage’s colour support. Here the artist moves away from traditional techniques, creating an even less important colour background in her works with great precision, and she further develops, connects, and frees this colour background by introducing repetitive geometrical patterns. In this way she demands that viewers expand their focus, directing their view from one starting point to the other, from the whole to the detail, and creating the desire in them to capture the entire work with just one look. With her perfected artistic language, Tratnik guides the viewer through a changing world full of mystery, which she partly reveals through clear geometricized surfaces and skilfully hides from view by overlapping them, thus creating an interactive play, through which she establishes special communication with the viewer.
She combines her works into thematic exhibitions, in which she further develops her communication with viewers and, through metaphorical and symbolic content emphasizing corporeity and meticulously created uncoincidental details, presents socially and internationally topical content to them in a relaxed manner.