KAKTOIDA

The versatile artist Iva Tratnik expresses herself through a variety of artistic genres, from textile collage and oil on canvas to sculpture, installations, and performance.
Exhibition Kaktoida features large oil paintings with bold colours, whose accentuated geometricized figures attract the viewers’ attention and guide them, by prompting them to reflect on the meaning of an individual work, to ideas about the sense and principles of life and the composition of the world. The artist combines 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 she 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.