Zmago Jeraj: I take a long step across a windowsill

You and your friends are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition by Zmago Jeraj on Friday, 8 March 2024, at 1 pm, at the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana.

An erudite personality, one of the intriguing aspects of Zmago Jeraj’s (1937–2015) intellectual world was his interest in literature. Within this framework, among others, belongs his enthusiasm for the work of the Polish writer and painter Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). To reflect this interest, the exhibition attempts to symbolically connect both authors through some of its elements. Thus, we have borrowed the exhibition’s title from one of Schulz’s stories, “A Night in July”. A line from the text, “I take a long step across a windowsill”, aptly describes a group of Jeraj’s works that awakened our attention. It is a group of selected paintings, photographs and graphic prints from the early mature phase of Jeraj’s opus at the end of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Jeraj deals with a specific problem: the relationship and transitioning between interior and exterior spaces, between inside and outside, between closed and open. In the images presented in the exhibition, we often see, on the one side, borders, barriers and fences, and on the other side, pathways and openings that “break” the former.

The design of the exhibition’s installation, signed by Toni Soprano Meneglejte, is also connected to the exhibition’s concept: the question of spatiality in the works of Zmago Jeraj.

Curator of the exhibition: Gregor Dražil