In the exhibition KEVDR, the artist focuses on the preservation of painting materials, tools and remnants of artworks waiting in the studio to be exhibited or sold. She preserves these items in oil – a medium she also uses in her painting – and seals them in preserving jars. The jars are fitted with labels describing their contents. Kevdr, or kevder, refers to a cellar or storage space dug into the ground.
The technique the artist employs is one commonly used for preserving produce from a home garden or orchard. This method of conserving fruit and vegetables is familiar to her thanks to her grandmother also using it. Through its use, the artist honours her connection to her roots while simultaneously creating an autobiographical record of her working environment, along with the products and residues of her work.
By replacing natural produce with the outputs of her artistic practice, the artist recontextualises a process that until recently formed part of many tasks categorised as often invisible and unpaid reproductive labour, most frequently assigned to women. In doing so, artistic practice is relocated into the realm of necessity, akin to the essential work of growing and securing food for the winter or for a longer, more uncertain and indeterminate period.
The multitude of jars forms an archive of studio work, organised in a way that establishes no hierarchy between tools (brushes, tubes of oil paint), materials not yet bearing an authorial mark (such as primed canvases), finished works, and remnants or waste. The artwork and the act of artistic labour remain intertwined.
At the same time, the artist engages with the question of preserving artistic activity itself, testing whether the ephemerality of process can be contained and stored within a glass jar. Through this gesture, she explores how an artistic process might be preserved and encompassed as a static point that can be observed and analysed without being subordinated to the flow of artistic production. The exhibition viewer is confronted with the promise of complete insight into this intimate process, a promise that ultimately reveals itself to be both impossible and reductive.
Kaja Podgoršek (2001) graduated in 2025 from the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in Ljubljana, where she is continuing her studies at master’s level in the same field. In the 2024/2025 academic year, she took part in the Erasmus+ programme at the Academy of Fine Arts in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. She has participated in several group exhibitions and projects, including the mural All Tomorrow’s Songs in June 2025, created under the mentorship of JAŠA (Mrevlje-Pollak) in collaboration with ALUO. Her text Ko ni pomembna končnost in je slika enako kot stena was published in the journal Likovne besede (no. 129, summer 2025). She has also taken part in the group exhibitions Young People Invited 2025 (Media Nox Gallery, Maribor, 2025), Orbico Supports Art (Bažato Gallery, Ljubljana, 2025), Fresh Fish (DobraVaga Gallery, Ljubljana, April 2025), the photography exhibition Fresh Fish (DobraVaga Gallery, Ljubljana, July 2025), and Young People Invited 2024 – Forms of Creation (Media Nox Gallery, Maribor, 2024). While in Slovakia through the Erasmus+ programme, she participated in the group exhibition SNP – Contemporary Narrative Potential (Gallery F(X), 2024) and the Iron Casting workshop. In the Czech Republic, she took part in the project Pokoje 2024 in Prague with the group interactive work Rast (Growth). She presented her first solo exhibition, Manure Is Manure, Gold Is Gold, at Gallery Peti Štuk in Ljubljana in 2024. She also contributed to the performance Made in China at GalerijaGallery in Ljubljana (2023) and to the project Uglasbitev videnega (Setting What Is Seen to Music, a collaboration between ALUO and the Academy of Music in Ljubljana) with the short video Depth of Memory (2022). Her practice is primarily focused on painting, with an indirect engagement in sculpture, expanding from the image into space and objects. She is particularly interested in materiality and process, which are becoming increasingly central to her work.
Curated by: Lucija Klauž
