Alenka Gerlovič

Biography

As a girl Alenka Gerlovič lived not in Ljubljana, where she was born on 17 September 1919, but in Brežice: her father, Franjo Gerlovič, was the district doctor there until 1929 and worked at the Čatež thermal spring. She finished primary school in Brežice. Later her father was appointed chief physician of the hospital at Polje, the family moved to Ljubljana, and Alenka attended grammar school there. Her sister Vanda became an opera singer, a soprano. In 1937 she entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the painting department under Professor Vladimir Becić. The strongest influence on her was the drawing of Krsto Hegedušić. She graduated in 1941.

A few months after her graduation the war began. Alenka joined the partisans, the Yugoslav resistance movement, and began with graphic work: she drew posters and leaflets. She was one of the first generation of puppeteers at the Partisan puppet theatre, where she worked both as a puppeteer and as a stage designer. There, among the partisans, she married the painter Vito Globočnik (1920–1946).

After liberation she studied at Johnny Friedlaender’s printmaking studio in Paris. On her return she worked briefly as a stage designer at the Slovene National Theatre, one of the first to do so in the postwar years. A year later she began teaching art history at the Classical Grammar School in Ljubljana. She told her pupils about the latest developments in modernism as well, and that is, to my mind, the liveliest detail of her teaching career. After the reorganization of the school system she taught at a primary school, and in 1968 she retired. In the same year her book “Likovni pouk otrok” (“Art Classes for Children”) appeared, and it won her the Levstik Award, the Slovenian prize for children’s literature. She travelled widely, wrote about her journeys in newspapers and gave lectures.

As a painter she concentrated on landscape and gradually simplified it from her early realism almost to abstraction. Her works are marked by strict composition, stylization and dense, true colour. In her last period she painted watercolours directly from nature: on the white of the sheet, in free forms, lay flowering trees, bushes and fields of flowers. She achieved a particular lyricism in motifs of the Slovenske Gorice hills and in other rhythmic motifs.

After retiring, Gerlovič devoted herself entirely to landscape in acrylic and exhibited a great deal. In her last years she returned to watercolour. In 1981 she received the Prešeren Foundation Award for her painting. In 2006 her memoirs, “Okruški mojega življenja” (“Fragments of My Life”), were published.

She donated her acrylic works of 1969–1990 to the Posavje Museum Brežice, and in 2007 received the Valvasor Honorary Award for the gift. She died in Ljubljana on 9 December 2010.