Biography of Katja Pal (Slovenia)

Katja Pál is a Slovene painter, she completed her MFA(Painting) from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2010. Katja is also the initiator and the artistic director of the renewed LindArt International Young Artists' Fine Arts Colony, Lendava, Slovenia. Her latest works explores the vitality of the relationship between a painting and its beholder. The subject of these paintings can be best understood within the question: “what happens when we look at a painting?”

Certainty we are all very well aware that a painting is “nothing but a marked flat surface”, but in spite of all that it seems we keep forgetting this, while observing a painting; looking “through” that surface “onto” the depicted scene of which we are a legitimate part. Katja is very fascinated by the tableau of Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas: it invokes the fiction of being surprised by the spectator, as if “caught in the act”. The picture invites us to participate in this game and to find ourselves literally in the picture, in the mirror on the back wall as well as in the recognizing gaze of the figures (the infanta, her maids, the artist himself). Her paintings play with this kind of optical illusion.