Exhibition Coordinator: Urša Šega
Poster Design: Nikola Dimitrović
X VITAMIN Gallery, in collaboration with Bažato Gallery, Ljubljana, presents HOWEVER, a solo exhibition by Slovenian artist Robert Lozar.
At the centre of Robert Lozar’s painting practice is a continuous exploration of space and the ways in which it can be constructed, perceived and represented within the two-dimensional surface of a painting. Through the relationship between painterly matter and the illusion of depth, between surface and space, light and shadow, Lozar develops a distinctive visual language in which intense fields of colour, lines and forms create complex and often ambiguous spatial situations.
His compositions oscillate between painting, object and imagined sculptural form. Rather than treating the canvas as a neutral surface onto which an image is placed, Lozar approaches it as an autonomous space with its own internal logic. Forms appear to emerge from the surface, recede into it or exist somewhere between physical presence and illusion. The material and the immaterial, the real and the imagined, continuously overlap.
An important element in Lozar’s work is the principle of the “painting within a painting”, a device with a long history extending back to early Renaissance painting. In Lozar’s work, however, this historical strategy is displaced from narrative representation and transformed into a means of questioning the very nature of pictorial space. Layers, openings, planes and framed areas create the impression of spaces existing within other spaces, destabilising the distinction between what belongs to the surface and what appears to extend beyond it.
His abstract structures can evoke landscapes, objects, architectural fragments or imaginary sculptures without ever becoming fully identifiable. Through chromatic transitions and the interaction of lines, curves and intertwined forms, Lozar constructs images that remain deliberately open. Their spatial relationships change through sustained looking, inviting the viewer to move between different possibilities of reading the image rather than settle on a single interpretation.
The title HOWEVER reflects this openness and the logic of Lozar’s painting itself. It suggests a shift, an interruption, a possibility that what initially appears to be one thing may simultaneously become something else. The painting is never entirely resolved into either image or object, abstraction or representation, surface or space. It remains in a productive state of uncertainty — a place in which different visual realities can coexist.
