Alenka Gerlovič in the NLB Art Collection

Alenka Gerlovič (1919-2010) would be a hundred years old this year. As a young girl, she lived in Brežice; she finished the higher classes of primary school and gymnasium in Ljubljana. She received the diploma at the Zagreb Art Academy in the first days of war in 1941. She soon joined the Liberation Front in the occupied Ljubljana, She had to go underground in the summer of 1944. She then joined the partisans on the liberated territory. She was one of the few women working in the Central Technical Service of the League of Communists of Slovenia and made an important contribution to the so-called partisan graphics. After the war she was destined to become an art teacher. She left an important heritage in this area and helped improve and expand art education in theory and practice, and she left an impression on many a student. She also received Levstik's award for the book Likovni pouk otrok (Art classes for children). She mostly painted in her free time and during holidays. She travelled a lot and always brought back drafts, sketches, drawings, slides and photos which she then used for her creative work in her studio. She was only able to fully commit to painting after her retirement and reached her artistic zenith in her latest period of life. At the beginning of her artistic career she made some attempts at figuralics but she soon focused completely on painting landscape motives which she formally developed into abstract geometrical poetry. Her frequent motive was Mediterranean landscape, the Cornates, the Karst, which will also be shown in the exhibition. She was among the first in Slovenia to adopt the acrylic painting technique. In her last decade of life, she left her studio to paint in the open. She loved nature and she created watercolour masterpieces, colourful and expressive images of trees, flowers, bushes in flower and other floral details or landscape images which were transformed into abstract forms. In 1981 she received the Prešeren Fund Award for her opus of paintings.

 Dr. Meta Kordiš, Curator