Jurij Selan: Mountains

Jurij Selan: Mountains
August 4 – September 10, 2026
Glass atrium of Ljubljana Town Hall
📌 Exhibition Opening: Tuesday, August 4, 2026, at 7 p.m.
🔹 Art and Mountains: Round table on landscape painting with Jurij Selan and Bernardo Stenovec, Wednesday, August 26, 2026, at 5 p.m.
In the Mountains cycle, Jurij Selan presents a selection of works in acrylic on paper, in which, as a painter and art theorist, he combines the exploration of color as the basic building block of the painterly image with his personal experience of the mountain world, to which he, as an enthusiastic hiker and attentive observer of nature, always returns. The cycle is part of the rich tradition of Slovenian landscape painting, while also enhancing it in an original way. In his works, Selan emphasizes the fundamental artistic fact that abstract and realistic images have the same common starting point, which only manifests differently; this common starting point is the color plane. With an aerial view from above, from a mountain peak or ridge, he meticulously paints picturesque views of the Slovenian high mountains with careful observation. From a distance, the scenes appear distinctly realistic, but upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves as a network of independent color planes that act as an abstract composition. The Mountains cycle is therefore not only a tribute to the Slovenian alpine landscape but also a profound artistic reflection in which the tradition of the landscape motif and the author's personal experience of space creatively intertwine with his exceptional visual sensibility and fundamental questions of artistic form.
Bernarda Stenovec
Dr.