As an author, Vladimir Leben bases his work on the classical medium of oil paintings on canvas. The original artist combines skilfully perfected figurative compositions with richly narrative statements, employing witty multi-level meanings to surpass comprehension on a purely symbolic level. From the beginning of his artistic carrier in the nineties and to this day, he has been working as a solo artist as well as collaborating in different projects, which brought together several artists. He is one of the founders of The Museum of Too-Modern Art, the so called collective of self-proclaimed “too-modern” artists (Oliver Marčeta, Boštjan Plesničar, Tomaž Drnovšek, Gregor Mastnak, Vladimir Leben, Ervin Potočnik, Josip Rochus Pongrac, Filip Gregorowitz and Gregor Nemec), who rejected the academic elitist approach at the end of the 20th century and expressed their tendencies for liberalisation of artistic expressions, turning away from narrowly limited artistic movements, individual styles or tendencies in order to strive to realise the ideal of pure creativity (Ivančič, n.d.). Within the collective, the artists worked on their individual productions and at the same time promoted the idea of “too-modern art”. In 2003, Leben was part of the creative team involved in the realisation of the animated movie Bizgeci (Beezes), and in 2004 he worked in tandem with sculptor Damijan Kracina, realising the attention-grabbing Galapagos project, which used a conglomerate of illustrations, paintings, objects and video to form a perception of a different, better world, “[…] where nature experimented in its creativity” (Kracina, n.d.), just as the artists did.
At Rajhenburg Castle Vladimir Leben presents his work through a series of wooden objects and a number of large dimension paintings on canvas, featuring animals as their principal protagonists. Animals have been Leben’s constant artistic motive, as they offer a wide thematic thesaurus. They perform entirely “human” acts; they ride trains, get their hair done at a salon, party at a discotheque and dance to the rhythm of music. Intensive colour registers refuse to try to mimic realistic manifestations of portraits, the artist intensifies the images’ narrative quality with their multiplicity, every one of his subjects caught in action, each part of the same circus, reflecting the view of the contemporary Anthropocene society.
Leben never ties content to an explicit social context. He treats it more like a commentary, expressed while observing society and its phenomena. The construction of straightforward narratives in his canvases often stems from anecdotes he stumbles upon in his everyday surroundings, or events he happens to discover in daily newspapers and are reminiscent of anecdotes. Such is the background to the Dog’s Life triptych - a story about stray dogs in Moscow, forced out of the city centre and into the suburbs in the time of the building boom in the nineties, which consequently removed them from their premium sources of food. But dogs being intelligent and adaptable creatures, they learned to use the subway to get back to the city. They were visiting the city centre daily and used the same underground line to return back to the suburbs in the evening. The first painting in the triptych, After a Hard Day’s Work (2010) features just animals, while the next two, The Return of the Cast-Offs (2011) and Invisible Workers (2012) include the presence of a human figure, a vagrant by the name of Lojze, who pins the composition to reality. In this way, the artist avoids the possibility of paintings being labelled as fables. The exhibition includes embroidered details from the triptych, presented with new titles, Upload (2016), Update (2017) and Backup (2018); the details were produced in collaboration with the creative embroidering team at the Ercigoj Art project.
A series of so-called saints, The Parable of St. Rok, The Temptation of St. Tomaž and The Ascention of St. Aleš also allude to personal stories of people the artist is fond of. In the text Brane Kovič wrote for Leben’s exhibition in the City Gallery in Nova Gorica, he labelled the content of these paintings as parables, “[…] as they, unlike fables, speak less to one’s intellect and more to one’s feelings, drawing instructions not from a negative outcome but instead from a positive example, empathy and an attitude of identification” (Kovič 2017). In this series, the artist paraphrases the well-established Christian iconography assigned to specific animals or biblical stories by playing around with titles and constitutive elements of the composition that further unlock understanding of the painting’s content. The intensive colour scheme intensifies the anxious atmosphere of the painted scenes. The soft light brings out the individual’s vice, which the artist employs to characterize the portrait. Leben started the series with The Temptation of St. Tomaž. The lemur Tomaž vowed to stay away from alcohol for an entire month. He took the place of St. Anthony from the Bible, who refused to give in when the Devil offered him intoxicating wine in a gold jug. Rok from The Parable of St. Rok is no saintly pilgrim, travelling around and curing infectious diseases. He is depicted as a lapdog in rural surroundings, lustfully scrabbling around for a basketful of ripe plums. The passionate carnivore Aleš looks a bit like the famous piglet Babe, a cute and naive creature who is only just beginning to discover the trappings of life outside the boundaries of his safe reality. The personified piglet doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the Italian Saint Alessio, famous for renouncing safety and comfort in order to seek the perfect love. Leben’s portraits align with the biblical martyrs in a playful and at the same time convincing manner that makes it easy for the audience to identify with them.
The Orthodogs poliptych is a series of four dog portraits, encircled in golden halos and with fishing hooks stuck through their snouts. Bottom left corners feature selected letters which in and of themselves aren’t very telling, but when arranged in the right sequence, spell out the word play Or-tho-do-gs. The artist chose this clever coinage to connect the dogs portrayed in the form of saintly individuals on golden background with the content of the depiction. The paintings are reminiscent of the images of Christ in the Eastern Orthodox Church, yet the artist himself insists that he had borrowed merely the form and not the content of such images. Medallions depicting hunting attributes are pictured in the bottom right corners: fishing boots, a vest, a hat and a stool. The artist developed empathy for the tortured animals when he read a news article about fishermen off the coast of the French island Reunion in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar, who used to catch sharks by using live juvenile stray cats and dogs as bait. Animal rights activists addressed letters of protest to the French government, strongly condemning such an attitude towards living creatures. The French government responded by issuing a statement, saying that the incident was an exception and not inherent to local tradition. The statement came with the promise that such practices would not be tollerated in its territory (Leben 2013).
On a less tragic note, the exhibition also brings paintings titled Backstage 2 (2018), Der Kleine Hans (2019) and Hot Dogs (2019). The scenes are set in a hairdressing salon. The series started with the impulse triggered by (at the time mostly Chinese) dog owners’ social media posts featuring images of their dogs turned into other wild animals, such as zebras, tigers and lions, with the help of hairdressing techniques and accessories. Leben refuses to take a moral stance when it comes to such actions, as he sees his artistic role as one of a commentator, who translates contemporary phenomena with wittiness and subjectiveness, trying to re-imagine reality. In the digital age, when fine art is increasingly marginalized and deemed non-communicative on account of the supremacy of interactive media (Prof Dr Jožef Muhovič n.d.), Leben searches for channels through which to materialise his ideas.
At the exhibition at Rajhenburg Castle the artist also presents wooden objects, which were produced in several series. The first series, titled Das Leben Hinter den Gittern, was the most playful and humorous, and featured animals bred for human consumption with bar codes on their sides and painted on wooden crates commonly used for vegetable distribution. This was followed with two series in similar technique, titled Circus Leben and Leben im Zoo, except in these two cases the animals bred for human consumption were replaced by circus and zoo animals, respectively. Each consequent series was more devoid of humour and rich in existential angst. The objects force the audience to question their own role in society, as they realise they can see themselves both in front and behind bars. Leben produced a new object for the exhibition held at Rajhenburg Castle, one where animals were replaced by mirrors, reflecting the spectator’s image back into space.
Animals’ quizzical looks radiate from two vertical canvases, Blessed Are the Fish (2010), with animals finding refuge on a tree trunk, and Chernobyl Interior (2010), depicting animals inhabiting a derelict space after a man-made disaster. This painting stemmed from a report written by journalists who had visited the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl after the nuclear accident in 1986. Visitors depict a city frozen in time, which is slowly being repopulated. Nature regenerates; plant life lushly enters buildings from the streets, while animals, no longer hunted by humans, populate the now empty interiors.
As a frequent member of animation teams and collaborator in collective projects, Vladimir Leben often upgraded his works and fitted them in different exhibition concepts. In 2015 he started to collaborate with Ercigoj Embroidery on their innovative Ercigoj Art project, bringing together advanced embroidery techniques and fine art (Kolar 2015). Their first collaboration was the embroidered triptych Dog’s Life (2015), followed by the audio-spacial installation Dancing Bears in 2018. Behind the jolly exterior, depicting bears in the throes of partying, hides a cruel fact about Bulgarian travelling circuses and their “dance schools”, where bears were for decades trained to become entertainment dancers. “Training” included torture techniques, such as scorching ironing boards, which forced the animals to shuffle their feet. Following drawn-out negotiations the Bulgarian government established reserve areas for “retired” bears, where they just kept on dancing (Leben n.d.). Original music composed by Aldo Kumar and Sašo Kalan, incorporating the sounds of working sewing machines, is part of the installation.
The exhibition presents the artist’s work in the last several years and is summed up by his latest work, Fuga Mundi (2020). The wooden underframe used to support a religious image in the Ljubljana Cathedral. Its former purpose and form directed the artist when deciding on the content of the painting, which retains some of its sacral undertone with a church organ placed in the background of the round architectural opening shining light onto a flock of brightly coloured parrots, as they fly down towards the spectator. The title of the painting could be read in translation as “isolation from worldly ways” and relates to the search of contemplative isolation, which was once practiced at the Rajhenburg Castle by its inhabitants, the Trappist monks. The work was made in the previous months when the invisible virus forced every one of us to show solidarity, to maintain social distance, and to retreat in isolation. In crisis this gave rise to unrest and intolerance.
Vladimir Leben gently translates existential reality into witty storylines, which reach him as narratives coming from outside and touching him emotionally. They dictate the framework, leaving no doubt as to where a painting starts or ends. The artist uses animals to articulate content with multiple meanings, incorporating a playfully-optimistic undertone. Leben’s works are a reflexion of contemporary times that, disguised as humour, steer us in an exciting way to reflect on our existence, to question its self-evident nature here and now, and realise that even small acts by individuals trigger a chain of consequences. This makes the current moment the perfect time to reflect on our own responsibility toward the future, as well as on the role art plays in the times which lie ahead.
Literature:
Ivančič R., A. (b. d.). Muzej premoderne umetnosti. Pojmovnik slovenske umetnosti. Source http://www.pojmovnik.si/koncept/muzej_premoderne_umetnosti/
Kolar, D. (2015). Vezene umetnine. Mladina. Source https://www.mladina.si/168115/vezene-umetnine
Kovič, B. (2017). Vladimir Leben: Slike in prilike / Paintings and Parables. Nova Gorica: Javni zavod Kulturni dom Nova Gorica.
Kracina, D. (n.d.). Galapagos. Source http://www.kracina.com/galapagos/koper.htm
Leben, V. (n.d.). Vladimir Leben. Source http://vladimirleben.com/?ds-gallery=paintings-volume-iv
Leben, V. (2013). Vladimir Leben. Source http://vladimirleben.com/?ds-gallery=paintings-volume-iv
Prof Dr Jožef Muhovič, fine artist and professor of art theory (n.d.). Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Source https://www.sazu.si/events/5b07e4d281a6944e8cfdf875
