Zora Stančič is an established visual artist who, through her extensive body of work, actively shapes contemporary Slovenian fine art. She explores the boundaries of printmaking and its role in modern visual language. Her first such comprehensive presentation at the City Art Gallery Ljubljana offers a thorough selection of graphic artworks, focusing on the diversity of narrative motifs and in-depth exploration of technical and formal execution. The exhibition is curated by Sarival Sosič, PhD, who places the exhibition within the broader context of contemporary artistic practices.

The retrospective exhibition Fortunately, glances leave no imprints highlights the fundamental threads that consolidate and confirm the key characteristics of Zora Stančič’s visual poetics. Among many works spanning approximately five decades of artistic activity, the artist presents the following series: Linocuts (1989–1996), created at the start of her career, where she experiments with formats—a practice that became a constant in her work. This is followed by the series Cut (2010), Mistakes (2012) and The first cut hurts the most (2012), about which the artist states: »I wanted to see what happens when you take cutting to the limit. When you completely exhaust the matrix, when the motif becomes almost unrecognizable. The concept of the project was to show the loss of a face or the process of an image disappearing using minimal means…« Other presented series include Dum spiro spero (2013), Forms of freedom (2016), and Out of the loop (2020), where the viewer physically enters the artwork, experiencing it as an activity that transforms according to each viewer’s perception. The artist emphasizes her interest in merging different art forms into a visual image and »creating a total artwork that interacts with space, transforming and reshaping it« to engage viewers on multiple perceptual levels. The exhibition also showcases the series Commission (2022), Headscarves (2016–2024), Eternal beauty (2020–2024), and Life in the tower (2023). By reviewing the artist’s experimentation with formats, the interplay of visual and conceptual content, and her innovative technological approaches, the exhibition provides an insight into the key cycles of Zora Stančič’s creative process and sheds light on her constant quest for new expressive possibilities and the role of printmaking in contemporary visual language.

Born in 1956 in Štrbe, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zora Stančič graduated from the Primary and Secondary School of Design in Ljubljana. In 1984, she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, and in 1990, she completed her Master’s degree in graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where she is also employed as an associate professor of graphic arts.