Andrej Grabrovec

Biography

In 1985 Andrej Grabrovec graduated from the Higher Technical School of Civil Engineering in Maribor. It was in that city, where he was born on 26 May 1959 and went to secondary school, that his sculpture began.

While still a student about to graduate, he worked with the school’s design and research office under Professor Borut Pečenko and the engineer Vukašin Ačanski, developing concepts, drawings and models for “forma vivo” in concrete. The term refers to sculptural objects designed for open-air spaces. In 1986 a long collaboration began with the Art Foundry and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 1990 he decided to work independently and in his studio began a large sculpture in clay and plaster. His way of working is this: he draws designs, makes models and looks for solutions for installation in the urban environment. He models large compositions in clay, plaster and wood in his studios in Maribor and Zagreb and has them cast in bronze at the Art Foundry in Zagreb. Descriptions of his work repeatedly mention a combination of art and geometry, of technology and a “transcendent dimension”. His recurring motif is the woman in the public European space: in his view, women made a decisive contribution to the formation of European culture, and they are inspired by music as a universal love.

His first public works appeared in the early 1990s. In 1992 The Sleeping Muse was installed in Graz, and a second Sleeping Muse was placed in 1993 on the premises of the Slovenian Government in Ljubljana. That same year he made the large sculpture Fall of the Crucified for the municipality of Razkrižje. In Maribor a monument to Lord Kocel appeared in 1994, the sculptural composition The Drava Fairies in 1996 and the fountain Dance of the Fairies in 1997. In 1995 a bust of Miroslav Krleža was installed in Zagreb. He had taken part in competitions earlier: in 1989 for a monument to Bishop Anton Martin Slomšek in Maribor, and in 1990 for a monument to Krleža in Zagreb.

In 1993 Grabrovec founded the Central European civic initiative Harpistic Table. For it, round tables, ceremonial meetings, exhibitions and concerts are held at the Maribor Gallery.

His most conspicuous project is tied to universities. In 2000 he placed The Prague Muse in front of Charles University and announced a project of cooperation among old European universities, European University Bridges. In 2001 The Rector’s Chair appeared at the University of Technology in Vienna; in 2005 the composition The Bridge was set in front of the new Jagiellonian University in Kraków; in 2007 Omega went into the botanical garden of Vilnius University; and in 2013 Historica was placed in front of Corvinus University in Budapest. In 2018 a composition of the same name, European University Bridges, was installed at Alma Mater Europaea in Maribor. Since 2001 he has published the magazine ga BERI, devoted to new relations in the third millennium. His other works include the relief The Portrait of Europe near Vienna (2002), Themis and Dike in the Faculty of Law in Maribor (2004), the water sculpture Mother Earth at the BTC shopping centre in Ljubljana (2006), the relief A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Ljubljana (2008) and The Chapel of Universal Love in Maribor for the close of the European Capital of Culture programme (2012). In 2008 he made the large Paradise Gate and the Pietà relief in his studio. For the thirtieth anniversary of Slovenian independence, in 2021, the Pillar of Statehood with the Slovenian Muse of Songs was installed in Lenart. In the same year a permanent display, Women’s Image in the Public European Space, covering 450 square metres, opened in Maribor.

His solo exhibitions have been held at the University Library in Maribor (1989), in Varaždin (1990), at the Otto Hase Gallery in Graz (1992), in Ljubljana, at the Government of Slovenia and at Nova Ljubljanska Bank (1993), at the Mimara Museum in Zagreb (1996 and 2017), at the Korotan Gallery in Vienna (2001) and in Rogaška Slatina (2019). At group exhibitions at the Grand Palais in Paris he received a MENTION award (2017) and the Arthur Leduc award from the French Association of Fine Artists (2019); he took part there again in 2020. Art historians Sergej Vrišer, Maja Vetrih and Damjan Prelovšek, and Marjan Žnidarič, director of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, among others, have written about him. He lives and works in Ljubljana, Maribor and Zagreb. A film about his sculptures was made in 2018.