From the road

We kindly invite you to the opening of the exhibition From the road, which will take place on Monday, 16 December 2024, at 7 pm in the DESSA gallery. The opening is followed by the traditional DESSA New Year's Eve gathering and party.

Tanja Simonič Korošak draws as spontaneously as she breathes. Her sketchbooks, which she makes herself, have accumulated more than 160 since 1992, when she started to record her thoughts and impressions in them. These sketchbooks are a collection of reflections on the projects she designes as a landscape architect, experiments with papers, drawing tools, and explorations of shapes, textures and colours. Often, they are also sketches from the paths that lead her through the intertwining of her professional and personal life. Some sketchbooks are more work-related, others, usually in the summer, are more wanderlust, depending on what phase her life is currently in. Many scenes recur over the years, such as motifs from her home town of Maribor and summertime Izola, and from her beloved cities of Berlin, Naples and Athens, where she occasionally goes to take drawing workshops or to museums and galleries for new inspirations.

Tanja is a curious explorer who expresses herself through various techniques. The fountain pen with ink, graphite and watercolour paints are her tools for observing the landscape and designing the new. Many of the pages in her sketchbooks - which are also of different dimensions - are devoted to experimenting with materials for artistic creation.

The exhibition features travel sketches, landscape images and impressions as seen through Tanja's eyes and drawn with her skilled hand. These are records of exploring and feeling spaces, nature, people, as well as ephemeral phenomena. The drawings show an attention to detail, but at the same time, the dimension of landscape is also sensitively and intelligently captured. The softly unfolding open space reveals the landscape architect while in the poetically harmonised colour accents the artist. In the sketches of figures, captured in a brief moment of the day, and in the tiny, playful images from the real and imaginary worlds, the artist speaks to us as a penetrating observer of her surroundings, a thoughtful researcher and an attentive woman. Her drawings are glimpses from the road, stopped and captured, records of landscapes that have awakened her attention, and of secret corners that she has plucked out of the eternity of space with her drawing. Each drawing is its own entity, reflecting the multifaceted and complex personality of the artist.

Špela Kuhar, doc. dr. Ines Babnik

Dr Tanja Simonič Korošak is a landscape architect, creator, researcher, conservator, traveller and owner and director of Studio TSK. She has studied in Slovenia, the UK and Sweden; her work and study trips have taken her to various cities, landscapes and gardens, from Europe to India, China and Japan. Her love of drawing has also led her to teaching at the Institute for Landscape Architecture (ILA - Institut für Landschaftsarchitektur) at Vienna's BOKU University, where she teaches freehand drawing. She also holds landscape and urban sketching workshops in Maribor and Ljubljana, and occasionally abroad.

Curators

Špela Kuhar, doc. dr. Ines Babnik

Art direction and graphic design

Ivan Ilić

Proofreading

Katja Paladin

Printing of the invitation and catalogue

Matformat

Printing of posters

Prima IP

Production and organisation

Galerija DESSA, December 2024