author: Nea Likar
title: Blue
year: 2023
medium: installation: drawing (ink) and digital wallpaper print (colour pencil, watercolour, acrylic, digital painting)
The illustrated wallpapers and sketches that make up Modrost / Blue are a mixture of imaginative (commentary) and factual (scientific) illustrations. In Slovenian, the word modrost has a double meaning – both “blue” and “wisdom”. On the one hand, the work addresses the relationship between man and nature as well as the endangerment and extinction of many species. Up to one million species are threatened with extinction, many of them in the next decades, as a result of global warming, climate change and hunting. In this way, the title of the work alludes to the Blue Planet and the rare and precious pigment, just as the animal (and plant) species that are increasingly threatened by the effects of human behaviour are precious. On the other hand, it also refers to wisdom, modrost in the artist’s mother tongue, and questions the devastating consequences of the human lack of wisdom, which is supposed to be an essential quality of man.
The Dodo, the Quagga, the Oahu Akialoa, Steller’s sea cow, the Baiji dolphin and the Tasmanian tiger are all species depicted in the sketches that are now extinct.
