Saša Bezjak: Portraits of Freedom

Exhibition
21. 6.–1. 9. 2025

The series of portraits created by Saša Bezjak on view at the Museum of Madness at Trate forms a collective spatial painting shaped by the layered history and symbolic weight of Cmurek Castle. Just as the museum preserves the memory of the castle's former residents, the portraits evoke a unique space-and-time shared by the artist and each sitter. Together, the displayed portraits form a polyphony, a collective echo of freedom, as Saša Bezjak reveals, through the trust of individuals, friends and acquaintances who sat for her before the canvas, just how liberating art can be. Her portraits are made with quick gestures and an intuitive, expressive use of colour. They are visual conversations between the sitter and the artist – about many things, including freedom. Freedom from what we would like to be or what society expects of us.

Characteristic for Saša Bezjak's work is a stencil-like, ascetic line, free of superfluous detail and meaning. She draws her visual thoughts in her diaries and embroiders them onto fabric with thread. She reflects on themes we cannot speak about aloud, on the body and sexuality, on passion and madness, on fragility and vulnerability. Like her sculptures and installations, these reflections extend into the space, creating environments and situations in which materials (clay, plaster, wood) coalesce, connect and conjure an emotional response. She creates constantly and everywhere, be it in the silence of the studio, amidst the hustle and bustle of art workshops, or during her Vienna residency, where she found a moment of respite from the constant banter of relationships to turn inwards on herself and her practice. Through portrait painting, she has remained connected to others, as she is more devoted to communication and relationships than many of us.

The portrait genre is a special creative chapter in the artist's oeuvre, which is a constant companion to her work and runs parallel to her drawing and sculpture. If her drawings and sculptures are self-referential, centred around her experience of the world, then her portraits are more closely related to her teaching work. What characterises her entire creative practice is the existential courage to share her reflections, triumphs and challenges with those close to her. Saša Bezjak is incapable of being uncreative and uncommunicative.

For a long time, she has focused her creative restlessness on the exploration of existentialism, in particular the Blue Rider group, founded by painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, which rejected academic artistic norms and naturalistic realism. Another point of reference is Art Brut, which she was able to focus on intensively during her residency in Vienna in May this year, including a visit to the Gugging Museum and Atelier 10. For Art Brut, the artwork is not an instrument, but a process of cognition. Art Brut breaks away from representational conventions, both individual artistic styles and instrumentalised academicism, and explores what is neither a real nor an imaginary world but is above all a space of response. Art must be born of materials that possess their own language; it must recall childhood and the innocent, primal figurativeness associated with it; it must feel like the primal peoples, and those moved by madness or genius. Instinct and a primordial intensity, mysticism and cult, the relationship between reality and its perception, associative and illogical thought, the meeting of the conscious and the unconscious, raw and frank expression, a saturated pictorial field full of repetitive details, or a single point and line amidst empty space, a burst of colour or a monochromatic impression – all these are the building blocks of the mental world of the Art Brut artist, who depicts personal dilemmas in order to draw attention to the existential plight of all humanity.

Saša Bezjak's free portraits are psychological studies with a strong expressive charge, in which the sitter is still recognised. They retain some character traits, for example, the position of the hands, the posture of the body and the orientation of the gaze, but mostly they surpass the point of identification and bypass the personality, passing into the background of who we are or who we think we are. On the one hand, the portraits are Art Brut-like, naïve or primitive in expression, caricatured or grotesque, whereas on the other hand, they conceal a mystical experience of what the artist sees and feels. The jittery and gestural brushstrokes define the character of the sitter, while the positioning of the hands allows Saša Bezjak to flirt with the long art-historical tradition of portrait painting, for example, the painting of Oskar Kokoschka and the Secessionist tradition, which was also further refined in the (self-)portraits of Egon Schiele. The colour palette is Fauvist and creates tensions between the colour surface planes, while the sometimes unfinished faces and the impersonal background blur the line between the realism of the image and artistic interpretation. Nevertheless, in a psychological sense, the portraits retain the documentary value of the moment in which the artist and the sitter find themselves.

As an artist, Saša Bezjak has established an emotional resonance with the inner world of the other person, depicting them in her individual creative style and visual language (from colour palette and tonal accents to brushstrokes, the play of light and contrast, and overall composition). As a person, as a human being, she has emphatically preserved the psychological depth of the sitter, their current mood and the freedom of the space-and-time of coexistence. Or as she has written herself in her artistic credo: "There are other kinds of beautiful moments when, thanks to my experience and knowledge, I read the psychology of a person from their face. This is often the very motivation behind my work."

Dušan Dovč

Literature: Jure Mikuž, Gabrijel Stupica, eksistencialistična umetnost in art brut, in: Jure Mikuž, Slovensko moderno slikarstvo in zahodna umetnost, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 1995; Gugging – Grounds for Art, ed. Johann Fellacher, Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Wien, 2006; Portret v novejši umetnosti, ed. Alenka Trebušak, Boris Gorupič, Slovenian Art Critics Association and Velenje Gallery, 2010; Saša Bezjak. Works. Drawings, sculptures, embroideries, ed. dr. Nadja Zgonik, Artwords, ZDSLU, Ljubljana, 2014; Dom za duševno defektne Trate. Vodnik po razstavi Neskončne Trate norosti (Exhibition guide Endless Meadows of Madness), Museum of Madness, Trate, 2024.

Saša Bezjak (1971), shas been a self-employed cultural practitioner since 2002. She holds a BA in Painting, a BA in Fine Arts Education and an MA in Sculpture. Her work is characterised by drawings stripped of superfluous detail, relying solely on the suggestiveness of line. Created impulsively and in large quantities, these drawings often serve as the basis for embroidery. As a sculptor, she experiences space as a distinct category, which allows her to be free from academic constraints and embrace greater experimentation. Since 1998, she has held around eighty solo exhibitions and has participated in more than one hundred group shows, both in Slovenia and internationally. She lives and works in Gornja Radgona.

Her pedagogical and mentoring work spans a range of artistic fields and diverse groups, with many years dedicated to early childhood education. For about seven years, she conducted art exercises for students of preschool education at the Faculty of Education, University of Maribor. She also taught art to adult learners retraining as preschool assistants at the Public University of Ptuj. For many years, she worked with amateur art enthusiasts on a long-term basis, collaborating with the Murska Sobota Occupational Activity Centre and its residential and workshop units in Gornja Radgona, as well as with the Gornja Radgona Fine Arts Society, where she organised workshops and art colonies. She works regularly with the Public Fund for Cultural Activities (JSKD) in Gornja Radgona, Murska Sobota and Ljutomer, and with the Gornja Radgona Youth Centre. She has curated and organised numerous exhibitions at the Gornja Radgona Cultural Centre and the Gornja Radgona Youth Centre, and has led a wide range of workshops, colonies and study circles primarily in visual art, puppetry, theatre, radio and film, under the auspices of the Public Library Institution in Gornja Radgona, and later also in collaboration with the Gornja Radgona Youth Centre, the Rastišče Institute for Green Ideas and the Museum of Madness.

She is currently increasingly engaged in the work of the Museum of Madness at Trate, where she contributes to the museum’s programming and organises creative, educational and mentoring workshops, meetings and exhibitions.

So far two monographs on her art practice have been published, entitled Saša Bezjak, Dela / Works and Saša Bezjak, Risbe / Drawings. In 2023 and 2024, at the invitation of the Maribor Art Gallery and the Museum of Madness, she carried out a project of group embroidery of drawings inspired by the photographs of Terezija Mostler, one of the first Slovenian women photographers, and later held an exhibition of the resulting works at the Judgement Tower in Maribor, entitled Needle in a Haystack. In 2025, she was selected for the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia artist residency in Vienna, where she conducted research into art, culture and the art market, as well as Art Brut. (sasabezjak.si)

Production: Museum of Madness and Saša Bezjak, June 2025

Curator: Dušan Dovč