The sea, the sun and the shadows of the Istrian landscape inspired the artist from the moment he moved to Istria until the end of his life. The works on display show a special relationship to this exceptional place, which marked him as an artist and to which he returns all the beauty, magic and relentlessness in his works.
About the Author:
Jure Cihlar, born on 8 September 1944 in Golnik. In 1960-64 he attended the School of Design in Ljubljana. In 1965 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1969 graduated in painting under France Mihelič. In 1970 he became a member of the Association of Slovene Artists and in the same year acquired the status of a freelance artist. In 1973 he moved to Portorož and for a short period took over the management of the Municipal Gallery in Piran from the painter Janez Lenassi. In the period 1968-2014 he participated in numerous art encounters and colonies at home and abroad. He continued to work as a visual artist until 2013.
He experimented in various artistic directions, from realism to abstraction. He is important in Slovenian art as a landscape painter, marinist, and above all as a painter of coastal Istria, as his works form an integral part of contemporary Istrian art. In artistic terms, he was interested in the harmony of colour, light and composition. His early period is marked mainly by figurative works or compositions with stylised and abstracted human figures. Already in the 1970s, he began to move away from figurative painting towards landscape, which represents the pinnacle of his oeuvre and to which he devoted himself fully from the end of the 1970s. The seascapes, Mediterranean landscapes, were created under the influence of the artist's life on the Slovenian coast and most often depict the salt pans of Sečovlje and Strunjan, seaside architecture, marinas, urban and other landscape motifs of Slovenian Istria. In his last years, shortly before his death, he devoted himself entirely to abstraction.
His works were awarded the 1968 ALU Prešeren Student Prize for Graphic Art, four prizes at the International Painting Ex-Tempore in Piran (1972, 1973, 1976, 2001), the 1974 Ars Histriae Diploma in Painting in Rovinj, the 2005 prize of the Association of Slovene Artists' Societies and the Hypo Alpe-Adria Group for his solo exhibition Landscape at the Insula Gallery, and numerous other prizes.
