Berko: You Are Never Too Far From Berko’s Star

Author: Berko
Title: You Are Never Too Far From Berko’s Star
Year of creation:
Owner: Berko
Work info: Digital print, 5 pieces

Description of work:
The present images were born as a cycle of prints entitled “You Are Never Too Far From Berko’s Star”. They address the fact that in the last years I took part in many graphic and other exhibitions (Trienale Krakow, Tokyo, London) with my Christmas stars. I brought some photos of those exhibitions and thus new images emerged to be exhibited this summer at the Novosibirsk Biennale and Villa nova de Cerveira. We may watch them on screen or in print. The answers to your questions would be very simple if it weren’t for the word “true” in-between. What is true? Is it true what I see and touch? Or is that important at all? Do I create images that are true? Or do I know at all whether I want to make true images? There are many more questions than answers. I reach my images in several ways. Some 30 years ago I painted the path (app. 200 m2) in the-then Marx park in Ljubljana (in front of the Court House). People have walked over it and within a few years all that was left were the slides of the original painting. Some years ago I brought the slides to be scanned. The people in the photo store have retouched them – garbage and all – and along the way they have removed the disturbing empty paint cans. I was left with a digital print, with the image of the painted path. The painting is no longer there. Last year I had an exhibition in Cadaques; a year earlier I got an award. As I was interested in the meaning of all that – whether it had any value – I went to Cadaques. It is an old fishermen’s town similar to Slovenian Piran only much closer to the edge of the world. Yet Dali used to spend his holidays there and the town was full of posters for his exhibition but nonetheless for mine as well. I took photos of that and of a few other things on the fly. Once back home, I put together the two images in one in Photoshop. In front of me lies the digital recording, an image that says something like “Berko had his exhibition here.” The other images that I have sent you were created in a similar way: they are a fiction based on true experiences. I also made a lot of pictures in the following way: I’d take a photo of mine or from the media, enlarge it 10 times and spend the entire month spraying or scrubbing it with paint-brush, then pass it on through media. Most people will be seeing just that image via media. In the last years, I’ve been often painting in nature with paint-brush on canvas. The painting is being born through many days. Is this image that takes up time in several days more or less real from the image capturing a moment and being passed on to us through media?
I like images. I watch and caress them. I stand in front of them as others are sitting in the movies – for hours.
I also like making images. I don’t know how to label them – are they real, more real than reality (hyper-real) or artificial? I leave labels and judgements to others; that is precisely why I have applied to the call. At least 20 times this year.

Berko (1946)
The dominant motives on his paintings are reflections and mirrorings in natural and urban environment. He is involved with painting and graphic prints.

Berko received his formal education in fine arts at School of Design and Photography where he graduated in the class of Prof. Marko Šušteršič and received the distinguished Plečnik Award for his graduation work. While studying at the Pedagogic Academy in Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1968 in the class of Prof. France Uršič and Zoran Didek, he made study travels to Italy and Greece. From 1969 to 1974 he taught in the elementary school in Železniki and attended lectures at the Art History Department of Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. In 1973 he was travelling through Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland. From 1974 to 1978 he taught at the Škofja Loka high school. Ever since then, he lives and works as free-lance artist by Kamnitnik in Škofja Loka.

Berko has had 60 individual exhibitions and took part in numerous presentations of Slovenian and ex-Yugoslav visual arts at home and abroad as well as at 40 international graphic biennials and triennials.

He is recipient of numerous awards including Visual Arts Award at the Biennial of Youth in Rijeka in 1979, the Scholarship of Moše Pijade Fund for residence in London, the award at 23 Miniprint Internacional, Cadaques, Spain in 2003 and Grand Prix in Ville-Marie, Canada in 2006.

More at: www.berko-slikar.si