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Tracing an artist from Slovenia to Flushing

From Sept. 9 through Oct. 22, the Queens College Art Center will present “Traces on the Wall: Works on Paper” by Metka Krasovec. The pieces are watercolor and mixed media work,, created by this widely exhibited artist who lives and works in Ljub

Included in the exhibition is a series of scrolls stretching most of the length of the gallery, which creatively use white, empty space and bits of color for a powerful effect. According to the art critic Tanja Mastnak, Krasovec’s scrolls “are not merely a series on a particular theme, but a creating a rhythm, a movement and an activity in time. The artist visually presents this fragility of experience through drawings and watercolors that appear to be sketchy, fast and accidental. The figures are often unfinished, and seem tiny and fragile on the white vastness of the paper. Interventions of color preserve the sense of intimacy, of insight into a hidden world of inner poetry.”

Of her own work the artist said, “My painting is a constant search against the tide. What I am looking for is the right form to express the inner sound I can hear and the light I can sense. When I came to a dead end in my painting around 1979, I started drawing and drew for two years, not understanding what was happening. All that was pent up inside me burst out — the collective past, the future, feelings, hopes, history, culture. These drawings generated a new cycle in my painting, and I still resort to drawing in moments of silence. They help me to open up and find contact with the creative stream. They materialize directly on paper without my will and without any previous idea or visualization. For me, they are akin to poetry, but without words. Through them I travel to the past and future in search of myself.”

Krasovec has studied in the United States as well as in London and Slovenia. She obtained two Master of Fine Arts degrees, one in painting and the other in printmaking, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 1999, she spent a month at the MacDowell Colony in Petersborough, New Hampshire. Since 1977, Krasovec has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. Her work is represented in several public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.

The exhibit is sponsored, in part, by the Consulate General of Slovenia and the Queens College Office of Research and Graduate Studies.

For more information, call 718-997-3770 or go to www.qc.edu/Library/art/artcenter.html.

The Queens College Art Center is located on the sixth floor of the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library, Queens College, 65-30 Kissena Blvd., Flushing.