Marko Pogačnik

Biography

As a schoolboy in Kranj, Marko Pogačnik produced a school paper called “Plamenica” together with Iztok Geister and Marjan Ciglič. The poems and drawings printed in it provoked a sharp reaction from the local authorities.

He was born on 11 August 1944 in Kranj, the son of Marija, a housewife, and Albin, a master printer and numismatist. His first exhibition took place in 1965 at the Prešeren House in Kranj, when he was twenty. From 1963 to 1967 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana and graduated in 1967. From the collaboration of the three friends grew the conceptualist group OHO; its beginnings are dated to 1965 or 1966, and it lasted until 1971. Its members also included the poet Tomaž Šalamun and Slavoj Žižek. Since 1968 Pogačnik has worked as a freelance artist.

In 1971 he and his friends began to join art with life (land art) and founded a commune in Šempas in the Vipava Valley. Before that he had taken part in Nova Gorica as a designer of the building that is now the Perla casino. He still lives in Šempas. From 1978 to 1985 he built a “network of landscape sculptures through the Vipava and Soča valleys”: Vrtovin, Šempas, Cesta, Visoko, Duplje, Vitovlje, Gabrje, Vipavski Križ, Bovec, Vogrsko, Podnanos, Zatolmin, Osek, Podkraj. He also made sculptures for buildings and designed interior decoration. He exhibited widely abroad: in Paris, Munich, New York and Florence. He also carried out a number of spatial projects on the rivers Sava and Kokra.

From the 1980s he has spoken of a holistic vision of art. Together with Marika, Ajra, Nike and Ana Pogačnik he developed the practice of “lithopuncture”: stone or other pillars are placed at chosen points of a defined landscape, in his words like acupuncture needles, in order to “heal the earth”. He made such works on both sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, in Villach, Jesenice, Klagenfurt, Aachen and Radgona, and on both sides of the border in Austrian Carinthia (Podjuna). The effect of the method cannot be verified, and I write about it as an artistic practice and the artist’s own conviction.

In 1991 he designed the official coat of arms of the newly constituted Republic of Slovenia. In the same year he received the Prešeren Fund Award for a survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. In 1998, together with Ana Pogačnik, he founded the Lifenet movement, which scholars classify as a New Age group. In 2006 he joined the Movement for Justice and Development, led by Janez Drnovšek, then President of Slovenia.

In recent years the town of Nova Gorica has commissioned several monuments from him. The best known stands in the central square and marks the thousandth anniversary of the first mention of Gorica and Solkan. Since 2008 a group of his monuments and birch trees, the “Hologram of Europe”, has stood in Ljubljana at the crossroads of Tivoli Street and Slovene Street. In the same year he was awarded the Jakopič Award, the main Slovenian prize in the fine arts. He was twice nominated for the Right Livelihood Award.

On 5 February 2016, at a ceremony at the Ministry of Culture in Paris, the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, presented him with the title of the 56th UNESCO Artist for Peace. Among his books are “Nature Spirits and Elemental Beings” (Findhorn Press, 1996; in Slovenian “Elementarna bitja”), “Ko se boginja vrne” (“When the Goddess Returns”), “Zdravljenje zemlje, zdravljenje sebe” (“Healing the Earth, Healing Oneself”) and “Peti evangelij” (“The Fifth Gospel: The Power of the Earth and the Presence of Christ”).