Opening: Friday, 22 March 2019, at 7pm
22 March – 26 April 2019

Peter Koštrun (1979, Ljubljana) is one of the most prominent Slovenian photographers of the younger generation, working as Assistant Professor of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he also graduated in 2007. He has been exhibiting at home as well as abroad since 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Moments, Mottard & Jenray, Liège (2012); The Time is Now, Photo Gallery Lang, Samobor (2012), Singularity, Photon Gallery in Vienna (2014) and Premonition, Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (2016).

Peter Koštrun is a master of landscape photography, refined selection of framing and light, as well as a specific, extremely subtle atmosphere that gives the impression as if his images capture something greater and immortal. His latest project is characterized not only by diversity of format, content background as well as formal expression, but also by the transition from the previously typically contemplative mood, towards an engaged force of expression. This is not established through a direct commentary or an illustration of concrete events, but through a radical change in the atmosphere imbued by the image. Feelings of discomfort, unrest, premonition, even threat are inscribed into the black-and-white photographs, most of which are coloured with a red ink, as a commentary on society. The landscape, in which a kind of unearthly, spiritual dimension has so far been present, enveloping physical reality like a veil, has taken on a haunting and warning air. The photographs in the present exhibition, into which (beside the images) Koštrun has also inserted some personal items, address the viewer to reflect on man’s deeds, his relationship to nature and fellow man, to reflect on the prevailing state of the spirit and subject matters that mark the present times and remain in the background of the photographs – from war to global warming, from erecting borders to the disappearance of the diversity of rural landscapes.

Koštrun has shown his work in many group exhibitions at home and abroad, including Almost Spring, 100 Years of Slovene Art at the Maribor Art Gallery (2012), as well as in one of the most important recent exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography, Sense of Place at the Bozar Expo in Brussels (2012). He participated at group exhibitions in Diemar – Noble Gallery, London and Wapping Gallery, London in 2010 and 2011 and at the From Community to Paradise. CSU Collection in Centre for Contemporary Art Celje in 2014. His works can be found in the Essl collection in Vienna and in the collection of the Cabinet of Slovenian Photography in the Museum of Gorenjska in Kranj. He lives and works in Brnica near Celje.