"Item #AT-0511-Janez Knez (1931-2011) Oil on Canvas â€œFlurs, Paris, 1960â€

Item #AT-00511
Janez Knez (1931-2011) Oil on Canvas “Flurs, Paris, 1960”

Description:

Janez Knez (1931-2011) “Flurs, Paris, 1960”
Oil on canvas
19.75 x 23.5 inches unframed
26.75 x 30.75 inches framed
Signed lower left
Verso: Paris, 1960, gallery label W. F. Burger Company Inc.

This is a wonderful example of Janez Knez and his early work. More academic in nature than his later paintings. Soft use of the paint brush with warm rich colors. He sold his early works to art importers to America. Some of his works he used different names and signatures.

Provenance:
W.F. Burger Co. (import gallery)
New Jersey Estate

The painter and graphic artist Janez Knez was born in Dobovec above Trbovlje in 1931. He studied painting at the Academy of fine arts in Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1958 under the mentorship of the professors Maksim Sedej and Riko Debenjak. He went on study tours to Egypt, Lebanon and Paris. He worked for 27 years as art teacher in Trbovlje, before retirement he had the status of an independent artist. Janez Knez takes part in the projects of retroguard groups Laibach and IRWIN. He received the following awards for his graphic and painting work: The Venetian Eagle in Udine, two purchase awards at the 15th and the 17th international graphic biennial in Ljubljana,
the Zupancic award in Ljubljana and the Award of the 1st of June in Trbovlje, where he held the title
of honorary citizen until his death in 2011.

The impressive opus of Janez Knez consisting of more than thousand works does not only witness about the author's outstanding creative force, but also about his deep personal devotion to that sphere of human life which can never be wholly uncovered and in which new challenges can be found despite the numerous years of creativeness. Even the early painting work of Janez Knez was noted by the openness to artistic incentive from the world art centers, acceptance of noble experience of the national artist tradition, accompanied by the will to declare the chosen topics through one's own views and experience. The lively, airy and sunny landscapes revealed the artist's genuine experience of nature as well as his enthusiasm over the possibilities that the color range offers for the formally unbinding artistic declaration of such feelings.

However, the local environment expected above all the painter's contribution to the topic of the mining area which Knez did not experience in the socialist ideological propagandistic variety, but through his personal exsistencial experience. His early mining figures in graphic techniques are thus closer to the pre-war social realism than to the heroical post-war socialist variety.

After a short period of abstract action painting Knez started to create a voluminous cycle towards the end of the 1960's, presenting through more than a decade the declaration of his experience of time and childhood memories by means of figure and sign symbolism.

By intentionally naive and childlike painting he inventively combined fragmentary images of his own past and present, adapting the formal artistic expression to the emotionally conditioned contents; this was exceptional enough and contrary to the then fashionable artist streams to enliven the Slovenian art space in the 1970's. Knez’s graphic work between the years 1982 and 1995 met with an international response; he returned with it to abstraction, this time into a strict black and white geometrism. He presented a series of screen paintings at the International graphic biennial and received several awards. As he was prone to innovation and constant testing of new methods of expression, he also cooperated with the retroguard groups Laibach Kunst and IRWIN, using in their project original works of art as the starting point for a new interpretation and evaluation of art.

Although Janez Knez keeps testing his creative power through various artistic practice, the virtuosic sensitivity for colour remains the continuity of his painting. The same is valid for his inclination to the figurativeness and the landscape which change on the canvas into autonomous and attractive colour composition by means of the artist's perception and experience, insubordinate to natural forms. The contemporary Knez's painting is cultivated and deeply premeditated, but at the same time dynamic, fresh and inspired, hardly pointing to a personality with a fifty-year-long painter's experience.
*Source ASKART