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Andreja Borin | Milan Golob: Paintings (of a female friend) and titles of paintings yet to be created (The accompanying text for solo exhibition bearing the same title in the UGM studio Maribor, Slovenia, 2023.) |
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Nina Jeza | Milan Golob (from the catalogue: PRESENCES, Kibla, Maribor, 2018, p. 42, repro.; p. 43.) |
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Sarival Sosič |
Milan Golob - Fragments of Happiness (from the catalogue: Fragments of happiness in art, City Art Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2013, p. 128-130, 5× repro., p. 71-78.) |
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Meta Kordiš | Die Toteninsel (from the catalogue: I, Here, Now, 2011, p. 72) |
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Sarival Sosič | Milan Golob (from the catalogue: Drawing in Slovenia II, 1945-2009, p. 248, City Art Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2009) |
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Vladimir P. Štefanec | A Marriage Between the Earthly and the Transcendental (Delo - Saturday, April 18th 2009) |
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Milos Bašin | In the Circle of Heaven (from the catalogue: Milan Golob, Queens of the Night, City Art Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2009) |
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Petja Grafenauer Krnc | A painting is a Painter's Friend (Dnevnik - Wednesday, 29th November 2006) |
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Vladimir P. Štefanec |
The Physical Formula for Love (Delo - Friday, 24th November 2006) |
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Milan Golob | Paintings (of a female friend) and titles of paintings yet to be created (The accompanying text for solo exhibition bearing the same title in the UGM studio Maribor, Slovenia, 2023.) |
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Milan Golob | My Friends (paintings) and Natalija (drawings) (the accompanying text for solo exhibition bearing the same title in the Equrna gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2006) |
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Milan Golob | Škure via Kazimir (the accompanying text for solo exhibition bearing the same title in the Equrna gallery, Ljubljana, April 2001) |
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Milan Golob | I couldn't Care Less for Artist (the accompanying text for solo exhibition Paintings in the gallery Equrna, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1997) |
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Milan Golob | The Test of Convenience (the accompanying text for solo exhibition PICTURES and Conveniences in the gallery Likovni salon, Celje, Slovenia, 1995) |
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Milan Golob | Paintings and Duchamp (The accompanying text for solo exhibition bearing the same title in the ŠKUC gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1994.) |
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****** Milan Golob: Paintings (of a female friend) and titles of paintings yet to be created Golob painted four circles at random for the first time about twenty years ago. They have been a constant in his work since then. In his small-size paintings, colour, background, painted circles, geometric grids, and other elements interact differently. Every detail is crucial. When the painting is finished, the artist assigns it a title that is just as important as the painting itself. He initially searched for the titles of the paintings among renowned personalities in the fields of art, literature, history, science, etc., but now the majority of them he discovers when travelling, particularly when visiting graves. The title of a painting could be, for example: Joan Beaufort (1407–1445), Zmago Jeraj (1937–2015), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), Ljubica Rafajlovič (1932–1958), Boro Đukić (1951–2013), Hafsa Mouini (2014–2014), etc. A painting labelled after a Scottish queen, a Slovenian painter, an American poet, a male stranger, a female stranger, and a child — to take the above random selection as an example — can be found side by side at the exhibition in the same room and the same row. A sort of creative take on the danse macabre. In this dance, which recognises no boundaries of gender, age, place, or time, each participant joins with only a few coordinates: the first name, the last name, the year of birth, and the year of death. Four points, four circles on the canvas of a lifetime. Andreja Borin ****** Milan Golob Milan Golob (1963) graduated in physics, studied art history and graduated in painting in 1993 under the mentorship of Metka Krašovec. He is a studious artist, who is first and foremost a painter, but also deals with video art and space installations. His pictorial field is always in the small-sized format. His painting oeuvre contains a huge number of rectangular (or quadratic) formats of smaller dimensions. The image is abstract, yet well thought-out in terms of execution: at first sight, the works appear similar to one another, yet a more detailed (or longer) look reveals that all the paintings differ from one another in terms of color and positioning of elements. Usually the artist assembles them into a larger rectangular-shaped piece, which only adds to the complexity of structure. Golob's painting approach is very mystical; in his opinion, paintings should correspond to the "universal spirit", they must be beyond the here and now, beyond real time, and at the same time, a part of it. Only one selected work from 2015 is presented in Presences, entitled Ingrid Kahr (1964-2012). He titles his works after epitaphs found in various cities and villages. The names of people who died, written as painting titles, have affected the artist spiritually. He likes taking walks in old cemeteries, which emanate something special, to some people it's scary, and to others cemeteries are places of holiness, quiet, and serenity. As the artist puts it, cemeteries carry hundreds of years of memories. The project started in 2002, with Golob creating 58 paintings in the first year, and then increasing the number of works each following year, creating between 40 and 100 pieces annually, which adds to a total of over one thousand works (more specifically, 1.025 paintings) over the course of sixteen years. He has 5.491 titles still waiting. Currently the last on this list is Metka Krašovec (1941-2018). Nina Jeza ****** Fragments of Happiness Milan Golob has for some years now been creating smaller format works that are, despite the similarity of their themes, chromatically diverse and unrepeatable in their artistic structure and surface and in-depth address. The color field or condensed color matter as a basis can be smooth, rugged, dynamic in their texture or minimalistically static; they can be brightly highlighted or placed in a dark color scheme, in which case the paintings are mysterious, almost metaphysical. The various colors and structural color bases are occasionally intensified by horizontal, vertical, diagonal or criss-crossing compositional linear accents that enable an endless diversity of the visual impact among the paintings. The artist repeatedly, persistently and patiently installs four circles within this basis, a kind of emotional images that symbolize, upgrade and add depth to the artistic narrative and make sense of it as a personal, authorial and poetic story with carefully determined titles. Sometimes, the circles will be in pairs of two equally sized, other times, completely different sizes, while sometimes they'll all be almost the same. In some paintings, they'll float in visible orbits, accentuating the idea of the cosmos, infinity and the eternal recurrence of existence and the motions of nature. The circles within a visible orbit are like a solar or lunar eclipse, mighty and mysterious, repeatable and transient, more than just products of perception. They occurred as a result of personal or collective symbolization. The artist named every piece after a person who has once lived, existed at a time and place and with their work, their deeds or just their existence left a mark, an impression, most importantly an energy that the artist at some point impressed into the narrative of the four circles and carefully chosen titles. The energy of transience and of the past, of existence that has come to an end becomes a positive force through art, creating an atmosphere that delivers the power and the meaning of the artistic endeavor, enriching the meaning of life itself through the presented images. Positive energy based on transience is without doubt happiness at its mightiest, in all its simplicity and eternal recurrence of being of the individual as well as of society. Within his visual activity, the painter isolates a new frame of life, a symbolic unit that he titles with the name of someone deceased and the connection, through an active and systematic artistic process, gains a distinctly optimistic and happy identity. Through the act of creation, the artist continuously experiences time, space, life and death, gives these experiences meaning through the infinity of the circle, the abstract nature of the colors and the order of the composition in a memorial artistic act, a kind of closet full of works of art, created through the act of creativity. The transformation of a once real person into a work of art is subject to the positive energy of the artist, who comprehends the process as a joyful act, a happy creation and a happy artistic narrative. In the dense layout that Golob created, the recurring yet diverse circles and paintings are as a whole transmuted into something intangible, subject to pure idea or metaphysics in all of its vagueness, elusiveness and infinite recurrence, permutations and internal artistic intuition of the painting – the pure happiness of abstracted ambiguity and artistic freedom. Sarival Sosič ****** Die Toteninsel Installation Die Toteninsel consists of paintings Johann Mallovič (1819-1883), Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), Ivan Marković (1850-1920) and photography of island Sveti Đorđe (Island of Saint George) in Boka Kotorska (Montenegro). For a decade the author has painted colourful structured paintings of small formats with four circles dominating various compositions. Nevertheless, as evident also from the current installation, the size of every painting is different, not a single circle is the same as another nor is any colour combinations repeated in other artworks. Every image has its own name and life that it lives autonomously or in an interaction with other paintings and photographs. The titles of Milan's artworks are inspired by real persons, more or less known individuals from the world of physics, literature, art …, as in the case of his first painting installation My Friends (paintings) and Natalija (drawings), 2006, or by the actual, although anonymous deceased, whom he introduced in the exhibition Queens of the Night, 2009, where the paintings were exhibited together with the photographs of tombstones featuring the name – title of the painting. Visiting cemeteries and gathering names of the deceased while taking photographs of tombstones is part of the artistic process. Milan creates his paintings with dedication and tenderness, and only chooses their titles subsequently, irrationally and relying on intuition, from the range of historical personalities or collection of his favourite people whom he mostly did not know personally. The story of the installation presented here is built on real individuals used by the author as the starting point of his narrative local legends and random associations. Around 1879 Arnold Böcklin and a certain countess allegedly visited Perast. Nearby is the island of Sveti Đorđe, where the town cemetery was located until 1866. The small island apparently inspired Böcklin (although the official sources claim otherwise) with his best known motif Die Toteninsel (The island of the dead), which was repeated in five variations (1880-86). The central painting of Milan's installation has thus been named after the symbolist. The two paintings on the left and right side were named after the deceased who lived in the town at the time of the painter's visit and most probably, speculates Milan, heard that the painter was in the town. Joahann Mallovič could have belonged to the Austro-Hungarian navy that was in the port at the time, and was depicted by a structure of gradual transition from dark to light pale turquoise green which serves as a backdrop to the bright English- red circles. Ivan Marković was perhaps a sea pirate, and is therefore depicted with the light Caput Mortuum circles on the background of the army–pirate green texture, intended to create mimicry. Under the three paintings there is a photography Sveti Đorđe, of the island which again united the dead and enchanted Milan Golob, who through the language of abstract painting and photography of a real location tells a story of potential reality and translates it into the actual reality of his own art context. Meta Kordiš, curator in UGM / Maribor Art Gallery ****** Through the dynamic play of mathematical derivations which tersely cover the soft and gently drawn images, Milan Golob explores the boundaries of visual expression's openness and fine arts relations. His drawings nostalgically evoke memories of classical Renaissance mathematical texts combined with many tiny lines. They indicate the ability of uniting and researching seemingly different fields, such as mathematics, physics and painting. The painter was attracted by manuscripts of highly sophisticated mathematical formalisms of modern theories in physics, and he began to incorporate them into his drawings. The exhibited works on hand-made sheets of different tints through an abstract visual play and the symbolic energy of mathematical signs enter the field of continuous and gradual change. The artist pushes the temporal boundaries of combining real mathematical formulas, numbers and signs into a uniform image, combining the concept of cyclic time, into which is included - through the sign code of modern mathematical formalism - also his personal, momentary existence. Sarival Sosič ******
Those coming to see the exhibition of Milan Golob encountered an unusual sight. All across the walls of the gallery were winding two horizontal, almost unbroken lines of exhibits, the upper consisted of small oils on canvass of different sizes, bellow each was a photograph with the same title. And on each photograph was a headstone displaying the name, surname, date of birth and death - these formed the titles of paintings. The exhibition could be viewed as continuation of the one Golob prepared about two years and a half ago in the Equrna Gallery in Ljubljana. Vladimir P. Štefanec ****** Memorials to the dead tend to serve as reminders of the eternal circle of life and death, as do artistic images sometimes. The points of departure in Milan Golob's latest series of paintings, Queens of the Night, are tombstones erected in commemoration of specific people, identified by the details of their names and dates of birth and death. Miloš Bašin ******
The gallery Equrna is today in the wider Ljubljana region one of the few serious galleries which continually monitor painting. By the current exhibition My friends (paintings) and Natalija (drawings) it presents Milan Golob, the artist born in 1963 in Ljubljana, who during his studies combined art and science, he graduated from painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, as well as from physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Despite the variegated media opportunities open to an artist with such broad education in the field of modern art, Golob remains faithful to the traditionally dominant art technique and remains a painter. Petja Grafenauer Krnc ******
The exhibition of Milan Golob offers viewers extraordinarily rich visual experience. The artist is exhibiting no less than 300 works of smaller size arranged into several groups. These produce the impression of rounded wholes and are at the same time parts of the bigger fragmented organism. Vladimir P. Štefanec
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Twenty years ago, four circles occurred randomly in a painting of mine and remained my painting constant; everything else has altered since then. Beginnings have always been delicate. The image of the circle may attest to the incapacity to truly begin, but it also attests to the incapacity to authentically repeat. Philosophy supports the idiot, being a man without assumptions. The paintings' dimensions have also been decreased significantly, but the space of my activity, which is propelled by the paintings, has grown. Soon, but continuously and randomly, I began to name these paintings after departed people (first and last name, birth and death years), initially, after persons who have spiritually inspired me in some way. But nowadays, most of the names for the paintings come from gravestones at cemeteries[1] all throughout Europe. There are presently 6,784 titles awaiting my creation of an artwork for them. Every year, I create 40 to 100 small-size abstract paintings with four circles in the image. The paintings are only finished when I assign or choose a title at random from my arsenal of titles. ________________ Milan Golob ******
I know what you want, but life is brutal, indifferent, it always forces us into silly errands. While the size fascinates, enables to perceive the world with the simulation of boundlessness which lures into the procreative telluric tomorrow. Kitchen-ranges. Circles. Four. Friends, girlfriends, a name on the Jewish headstone in Dolga vas or in Gemäldgalerie in Berlin. Nice. Bottomless bottom, high. No resistance. Enthusiasm and fascination over the manuscripts of modern physical formalism. Solid matter, astrophysics, plasma, particles, fields, dead serious and the scribbling which draws me toward myself and unsentimentally elbows in stunts with errors. The entrance to something majestic. Milan Golob ****** The start, who knows where from, why and how, had nothing to do with me. All I could do was to sincerely engage with the substance. If I am bound to hang, I most definitely will not drown. Stendhal admitted that at the end of the chapter he knew nothing about the events in the following chapter. Nor was it clear to me that I will travel even through Kazimir and end up in Škure. Sometimes I simply follow my nose. I notice but foreigners, which is sign of my transition. A dim recollection tells me that I have also met Velimir Hlebnikov and Boris Mikhailov along the way, though it might have been just a dream or even madness. I will try to get ticket for the next ride for if I stay here I might ruin everything. As the saying goes: "You are hungry before you get to an inn." Still, the body is not familiar with hope, but solely with butterflies in the stomach. However, since I am born for a bright day, it could all turn out differently. I have definitely found out that it is not just the urban, modern city, i.e. Hegel City, that provides the spirit the necessary space to become aware of itself. Anyway, nobody still said anything ultra about colours or death. And it is gradually getting clearer to me why Rothko towards the end of his life ended his friendship with Newman, Still etc. After all, what could be great in being indifferent in times of welfare? There is no way back for the free. Milan Golob ******
Art has for me never been a challenge. It's simply too easy. You drift from one brilliant idea to another and everywhere you turn you encounter nothing but fog. Artists bore me, at a closer look you realize they have no original ideas, they merely chase wind. If one declares himself an artist, no matter where and when, it is the same as if declaring oneself an idiot. Self-appointed artists are eager to participate in "up to date" happenings and suffer because they are allotted a marginal position. There's no end to their tirades defining art, but what's the use of it when they are too dull and empty to experience anything meaningful. Mere waffle and babble about expanding of barriers. Milan Golob ****** 1. Do you find nature more interesting and therefore you hardly look at painting?
2. Do you see yourself as an animal whose impulsiveness and instinct are covered with a fine coat of civilisation?
3. Are you still capable of perceiving the depth of an image and not merely the surface reduced to a screen picture?
4. Do you believe that a strict hierarchy should be structured in the field of art, just like in the Catholic Church, army, etc.?
5. Are you capable of doubting even obvious things?
6. Which of the following Czech poets do you prefer?
7. What causes changes in the focal point of art?
8. What do you use for frequency synchronisation of your phase delay?
9. What is your life strategy like?
10. What is the relation of everything that has been asked up to now to painting (art)?
11. What is the aim of art?
12. Do you think that life is a fairy tale?
13. We have the following sequence: bicycle, haystack, mirror . What comes next?
14. What was the weather like yesterday?
15. It is possible that an event is real in painting, but not in history?
0-11 points. There is no doubt about your convenience. Of course, you have the upper limit, but this does not diminish your recurrent commutative conveniences. The purpose of rotation of your conveniences and matching ideas is positive. Everyone loves you, and you are very mature. 12-23 points. Not even God, when he was your age, was more convenient than you. True, sometimes your convenient ideas are peripherally oriented, but nevertheless the doors into the class of remnants are still open to you; you still found a number of convenient thing to be strange, and this lack is the source of your artistic creations. You are happy. 24-35 points. The inarticulateness of distance is the soul of your convenient beauty, and your conceptuality is not just a stroke of luck on a motionless day. It is not wise to apprehend the state of emergency and then to conclude contracts of alliance with turncoat intentions. You are charming. 36-45 points. You know more, although sometimes you behave as if less is required. Your convenience is flawlessly schizophrenically fanatic, but it is like this only in the framework of pyrotechnic ideas. You are satisfied, and if you stand on your toes, you are bigger, since convenience is not your trump card. Milan Golob ****** Come closer if you dare, I'll grind you up like sugar and I'll ride my bike so far that carmine will be split all over your thighs. In Pisanello's Vision I'll tell you that it makes me feel sick, that we are all so bloody clever and spiritual nowadays, but in fact nothing more than three-week-old doughnuts. I'll throw away conceptual anti-painting, and if by chance there's a flood of pop-minimalist industrial products, I have an inflatable boat with me. In the case of nothing but increased moisture, we'll just ride over Kosuth's intelligent worms. Cutting the throats of ready-made fetishes will not smell of ping pong zen philosophy. Sand, a mirror and a burek can be blessed by whosoever wishes to it's all the same to me. Our bike can also break down, but don't worry, we'll borrow some handcart from the nearest gallery. It won't get rusty, I have enough oil. I'll imagine myself a thoroughly good painter and you - whatever you want. Milan Golob
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