MARKO ŠAJN
Marko Šajn is an artist who successfully combines his own individuality, dedication to creative work, and deeply ingrained perseverance. He moves confidently across various media, from graphic art to painting and sculpture, which serve as processes for exploring the boundaries between space and the viewer’s perception, with the associative element playing an important role. His oeuvre is marked by the purity of formal language, reduction, deliberateness, and subtle sensitivity. In the creative process, he is primarily interested in the structure of visual language: light, the relationship between color and pictorial surface, lines, and their material and spatial presence (architectural logic), through which he shapes his installations. His spatial solutions often function like drawings in space: precisely measured lines and surfaces create a balance between rational planning and emotional responsiveness. The monochromatic background is not merely a neutral backdrop, but an active element that determines the final appearance of the work. His recognizable visual language is characterized by refined graphic imagery. The works are either vividly colored or constructed from a restrained gray palette. They are often playful, with a visually clear language and emphasized metaphors.
Narrativity is characteristic of Marko Šajn’s work—even though the images are stylized, through figures and scenes he reveals stories about society and the relationships within it. In his works, he frequently transcends the traditional understanding of painting as a two-dimensional field and enters space through sculpture. The canvas or surface becomes a starting point for broader explorations that expand into three-dimensional installations or spatial interventions inseparably linked to the architecture of the exhibition space. In this way, the environment itself becomes an artistic installation. The viewer is therefore no longer merely an observer, but becomes a participant who experiences the work through movement in space, shifts in perspective, and the experience of duration. In the artist’s understanding, the artwork is not a finished object, but a process and a relationship. The embraces and intertwinings that form the central thread of his work are, at their core, primary relationships and consequently ontological processes of being in time and space that construct stories. From the moment we arrive in this world, we wave our arms and seek support and comfort in the mother’s primary touch and embrace. Later, touches and embraces become increasingly complex and determine our interactions with others, and consequently the story of our lives. What stories, then, are hidden within the embraces of Marko Šajn?
The protagonists of these stories appear as stylized typological figures, where the associative element primarily positions them as subjects, while their schematic depiction—faceless, with “Kraftwerk” hairstyles and uniform clothing devoid of ornamentation—defines them very objectively, as signs, or rather, a multitude of signs. This cold objectivity may partly be the result of process, since at one point Šajn used digitally generated AI images of embraces as a basis for his work. These images served merely as dry information, which he occasionally included in exhibitions without artistic charge. Comparisons with his own works in such cases clearly demonstrated and emphasized the difference between algorithmic and artistic discourse. The visible surplus—the moment when we simply say that the painting “came into being” and truly stands on its own—is best perceived in the suggestion of intimate, subjective stories. Through compositional arrangements of intertwined figures, Šajn opens an entire spectrum of embraces and touches, from loving or friendly hugs to rougher, gladiatorial or military close encounters, which in the second half of the twentieth century primarily occurred in sports arenas, but today have become some of the most media-exposed images of global collapse. In doing so, the artist reminds us how thin the line is between these extreme emotions, while emphasizing the importance of solidarity and comradeship. This is also clearly expressed in his sculptural oeuvre, in which the intertwining of figures illustrates the relationships between them and the solidity of the group. At the same time, he warns that despite the complex strength and interconnectedness of the sculpture, it is enough to separate a single joint for the entire composition to collapse.
For the exhibition space of Krka, the artist and I selected a combination of paintings in acrylic on canvas and graphic works on paper made using risograph collage techniques. We particularly highlighted two large triptychs on paper titled Confrontation (2022) and Avoidance (2022). These works clearly demonstrate Šajn’s recognizable authorial poetics, with restrained backgrounds and limited space, stylized faceless figures, geometric body forms that create dynamism and movement, and each body segment clearly defined as a graphic sign. As wholes, the triptychs create the sensation of intertwined movements, as if the figures were captured in a moment of physical interaction, whether dance or combat. Primary colors are used—red, blue, yellow, green, black, and gray—without shading or detail. The dynamism is clear and graphically powerful, which is characteristic of Šajn’s work. The playful compositions are simultaneously conceptually sharp—building metaphors about everyday life, social relations, and identity from simple forms. In his expression, color functions as energy, the figure as sign, and narrative as a bridge between artist and audience. The figures pass from one section into another, as though the artist wished to suggest how quickly potential points of conflict, or their focal points, can spread. Slightly removed from the heat of struggle, we placed the work Reconciliation (2022), which points to the necessity of civilizational reconciliation and the absurdity of conflict.
The story of the exhibition continues with acrylic paintings on canvas, among them Human figures in a group hug, standing, holding each other (2023). In this work, the previously mentioned ontological human need for coexistence is emphasized, which Aristotle described with the term zoon politikon. The artist already emphasizes in the title that the protagonists are connected in a shared embrace—that they are a mass flowing into a common collective body which can only achieve its goals and overcome conflict and individual suffering when united. It is an instructive and ancient story which, unfortunately, within the evolutionary cycle of Aristotle’s “political animal,” must be repeated over and over again as a warning. Yet, due to partial interests, it all too often slips into oblivion and leads to catastrophe, after which values must once again be rebuilt and reestablished from the beginning. Given the current state of the world, one can only hope that this time it will not come to that.