My name is woman

Opening of the exhibition My Name is Woman by Ksenija Zmagaj. 

Ksenija Zmagaj was born and spent her youth in Črna na Koroškem. After graduating from the Pedagogical Academy in Ljubljana, she taught at the primary school in Kobarid and at the branch schools in Drežnica and Livko. She is a painter and poet and has published four collections of poetry, with six more to come. Ksenija Zmagaj is a mother, teacher, artist and free bird. Anamarija Stibilj Šajn will talk about her painting work. The exhibition will be on display until 31 July 2024. Ksenija Zmagaj - My name is woman Seismographically sensitive artist Ksenija Zmagaj expresses herself both through visual images and words. Creation is her inner necessity, her most intimate calling, which she follows without restraint or censorship. Thus, in the field of art, she is working on a large-scale cycle of paintings called My Name is Woman, which also links the works in her current exhibition presentation. The artist has always focused on women's themes. Her paintings are a hymn to woman, emphasising her greatness and inner beauty. It pays tribute to her roles and her mission, above all to the fact that she is the bearer of life. At the same time, it also highlights woman's tenderness, softness, sensitivity, fragility, vulnerability. She has been working on these themes for a long time and over the years she has changed her artistic techniques and interpretive styles. In the last decade she has been working in acrylic on canvas. She has created a distinct image of woman, even giving her an archetypal identity, which is variable through new incarnations. The female figure is the fundamental image of her personal stories, her narratives, which are above all confessions. The figure of the woman is her confidant, her interlocutor, with whom she presents her deepest thoughts, her insights, her intimate feelings and emotions, her experiences. With her, she reveals her self-awareness. It is She who enables her to discover her own self. She places her chosen one at the centre of the composition. She articulates her in a distinctly authorial way, approaching it with stylisation and reduction to the essentials. He establishes her appearance with an active, fluid, strongly contoured drawing. Most often, he focuses on the bust or emphasises her face, which is almost as a rule shown en face. She devotes her creative attention to a single figure. Some of the solutions are full-figured and the figures sometimes appear in pairs; two female figures or a female and a male figure. She achieves their expressive power through an original simplification of the body, and especially of the face, which is the focus of her creative attention. This, in the form of a kind of magnetism, is particularly present in the large, dark eyes of the sitter, which are a dominant element, a well of eloquence and a mirror of the soul. The eyes radiate numbness, disappointment, sadness, fear, doubt, misery. But no matter what states and emotions enfold the actress, she is always the queen. The author even emphasises this by placing a crown on her head. To make her look majestic, dignified, elegant and graceful, she also embellishes her with various other headgear, a hat or a beret, or weaves various decorative details into her hair. And, of course, she always carefully styles her hair, a symbol of femininity and sensuality. Her chosen women have long, thin necks to show, on a symbolic level, that they are reaching out from the material to the spiritual world. When she embodies them fully, she paints thin, supple arms that rise up by their heads and form a flower on an associative level. In addition to the formal solutions, colours are an important part of the painter's personal artistic expression. The artist inhabits these within contour-established surfaces. Vasily Kandinsky said that colours, like sound in music, have the most direct access to the soul. And this is why we can speak of the painter's distinctly idiosyncratic colourist approach. Some of her female faces are clothed in cool chromatic values, others in warm ones, and they just glow with their intensity. Through her choice of colours, the artist reflects on the states of her soul and spirit. She is an arbitrary colourist, but through her colour palette she is unconditionally true to herself, to her inner atmosphere. The famous Van Gogh wrote in one of his letters to his brother Theo: "Why not paint his hair blue, if that is how I see it". And in this we can also perceive the colouristic treatment of the female figure that is characteristic of Ksenija Zmagaj. The artist is a colourist hedonist who loves colours, adores them, breathes them, feeds on them and they give her energy for life. And colours are the source of the artistic life of her paintings. She always brings together two colours that are close to each other, that harmonise and support each other. In her work, drawing and colour also support each other, because they are in a binding relationship. Nomen est omen. Xenia wins on her creative path because she follows herself. She experiences herself, she confesses herself, and the act of creation is a kind of mantra, a meditation in which she experiences her personal catharsis. She reveals her personal depths through her work, she lays herself bare in her uniqueness, and we can even see her self-portrait features in her eloquent narrators. Her open-eyed face is not only a mirror of her soul, but also reflects the stories of many other women.  Today, creativity is stylistically unrestricted and only the poetics of the author count. Xenia certainly has her own, freely chosen and self-created one, which she often expresses symbolically by painting a bird alongside a female figure as a sign of freedom.