Ganes Pratt

Established in 2006 by owner and director Primož Nemec, Ganes Pratt Gallery aims to build up the professional commercial art system in Slovenia by presenting selected national and some international artists of the young generation. Primarily functioning as a sales gallery, its equal goal is to present, promote, and produce chosen artists and their projects. Ganes Pratt entered the international commercial realm in 2007 with the participation on the art fair Liste Köln. In 2009 the gallery co-operated with the Ljubljana International Biennial of Graphic Art.

Programme

Ganes Pratt stimulates the development of new ways of expression in classical and new media. The artists represented by the gallery are radical, but not in the sense of ruminating about the changes that have happened in the turbulent past of Eastern European countries. Their research in various media is turned towards the visual, the aural, and the tactile, the exploration into the state of artistic media today and their insertion into the public sphere imbued with capitalist consumerism.

Artists

Two generations of artists are represented by Ganes Pratt Gallery. The first one is tightly connected with the Venice Academy of Art, where almost all of them have been studying and were presented on the very first exhibition of the gallery, opened on 25 April 2006 under the title Bad girls & Bad boys: Jaša, Meta Grgurevič, Jasmina Cibic, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Simone Settimo, Giorgio Andreotta Calo and two artists promote study of art in Ljubljana, namely Viktor Bernik and Urša Vidic. In 2007 and later other artists were invited to work with Ganes Pratt Gallery: Arjan Pregl, Žiga Kariž, Mark Požlep, Nina Slejko, and Dejan Kaludjerović.

"I do not represent fifty artists, which the economic logic would dictate to be more successful in satisfying the taste of the bright public. Long-term co-operation with selected artists and the common development of relations within a small group means much more to me,” said director Primož Nemec in an interview with ''Mladina'' magazine in 2007.

Exhibitions

2006

After starting its activities with the group show Bad Girls & Bad Boys in 2006, Ganes Pratt Gallery presented itself at the City Gallery, Ljubljana three solo exhibitions were on view in the first year: Let's Put an End to All Disasters, a follow-up to a project by Jaša at the Sarajevo Winter Festival realised in co-operation with Festival Ljubljana; a solo exhibition by Urša Vidic; and a project by Išvan Išt Huzjan. Ganes Pratt Gallery also presented the Cocktail Problem by Meta Grgurevič and Jaša in the international festival of installations OPEN06 at the Lido in Venice.

2007

The 2007 programme of the gallery commenced with a presentation of work by Meta Grgurevič in relation to the exhibition Radical Chic by Jaša at nearby Equrna Gallery. The project Check Point by Jaša and Ištvan Išt Huzjan was subsequently organised in co-operation with Kapelica Gallery at a number of festivals, including the Archipelag-Archipelago Festival, Nova Gorica and Gorizia, and Jaša's project Keep On Waving Your Guns was presented as part of a site-specific installation realised in co-operation with ProstoRož - FlowerSpace Association. In March 2007 the work of Jasmina Čibic (who studied at Goldmiths College in London) was featured – the first solo exhibition of the artist in Slovenia. Further, Viktor Bernik, Sašo Vrabič, Mark Požlep, and Simone Settimo from Italy also showed their new work here. December 2007 saw the group exhibition Painting Project by Viktor Bernik, Janez Janša, Arjan Pregl, and Sašo Vrabič.

2008

The 2008 Ganes Pratt programme featured eight personal exhibitions of the following artists: Jasmina Čibic, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Nina Slejko, Urša Vidic, Dejan Kaludjerović, Jaša, Arjan Pregl and Meta Grgurevič. Two curated exhibitions were presented as well: the exhibition of Sašo Vrabič and Tanja Vujinovič entitled Non-central Domains were part of the programme of showing video art in Slovenia after 2000. The summer months featured the group show Down the Rabbit Hole, borrowing the quotation of the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This exhibition curated by Nadja Gnamuš and Petja Grafenauer put contemporary paintings on the pedestal including art works of Viktor Bernik, Beli Sladoled (Miha Perne and Leon Zoudar), Ksenija Čerče, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, the visual artist Janez Janša, Jaša, Matej Košir, etc.

2009

Besides solo exhibitions of Mark Požlep, Urša Vidic, and Arjan Pregl, the Gallery joined as one of six locations in autumnal months of 2009 the Ljubljana International Biennial of Graphic Art thus co-creating the exhibition The Matrix: An Unstable Reality. The participation of Ganes Pratt Gallery was entitled 6 Monkeys, 300 Envelopes and 1 Love: Incomplete as Always, curated by Petja Grafenauer. The exhibition was defined by the idea of reproducibility, which was the essential component in each of the exhibited works. The matrix of those works was sometimes an already-existing image or material, but there art works expressed primarily by sound were also exhibited, further was the attention on ideas and feelings, which were speaking to the fact that the matrix is not necessarily a physical object. The exhibited artworks attempted to break through the shell of external factors that define how they are received. No matter where they appear, they wanted to tell important stories. In various languages, they spoke to us of morality and truth, love and evil, death, biology, history, infinity, and universality. Artists: Ištvan Išt Huzjan, David Kareyan, Tracy Moffat, Julieta Aranda, Ksenija Čerče, Viktor Bernik, Ivan Fijolić, Marko Tadić, Dejan Kaludjerović.

Location

Located initially on Gregorčičeva ulica 3, next to the Equrna Gallery, Ganes Pratt Gallery eventually relocated to an apartment in the first floor of Cankarjeva cesta 7, on the street which connects the Three Bridges and Prešern Square with Tivoli Park beginning at Moderna galerija/(Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana).

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