Art criticism
Mira Resnik’s work has been reviewed by various art critics, among them art historians Anamarija Stibilj Šajn, Iztok Premrov and Saša Bučan.
Anamarija Stibilj Šajn
believes the academic painter Mira Resnik’s approach to her metier to be complex and stemming from a broad, life-inspired point of view. Ever since her creative beginnings, Mira has conceived of the visual art world as a media-open and transient space. Her work intertwines elements of painting, printmaking and sculpture, and is simultaneously classical and contemporary. Her creations present an exploratory, insightful and flexible visual language appearing in multiple techniques. Although a painting – an image – might have gone through countless changes and interpretations of different media, Mira Resnik always ensures its different reincarnation. In a compositionally balanced and technically sophisticated way, she fuses diverse visual approaches and materials. She creates a balance out of diversity, which testifies to intensive research, to artistic reflection and conceptual deepening of the chosen creative guidelines, to vision and insight into both the artistic medium and life itself as an inexhaustible source of motivational material. Collage applications, unique textures, perforations and grids, and sculptural forms fill and make sense of the spaces of her life.
Iztok Premrov
believes Mira Resnik to view her creative process as a constant conquest of new spaces and artistic horizons, which open the way to her own artistic progress. She is trying thus to respond to the present time, as she believes that an artist must find some fundamental harmony between their inner world and the world they live in, inhabit and search for meanings. Using original images and a direct interplay between her thought process, artistic endeavors and convincing confessions, Mira constantly builds a bridge between the two worlds. One of the essential artistic means she employs to create her images are nets. She creates them by assembling a wide variety of collage elements and by direct weaving processes. These mesh structures have a series of symbolic meanings, linked on the one hand to the crystalline structures of various chemical compounds (analytical chemistry is her original profession) while on the other the grids evoke the social network that a person might built up over years of activity, life and creative work, and represent the basis on which we grow and are enriched inwardly. The other two essential elements of her artistic expression are layering and color, both lending her images a unique dynamism.
Saša Bučan
says that having gone through a difficult personal experience, Mira Resnik is better able to cope with the awareness of the importance of the moment, which is here and now and never repeatable, and wants or requires us only to live and feel it as best as possible. It was in one of these moments that the artist’s desire and clear awareness that she had to go on a journey of color and line had finally become mature. Thus, a number of artistic stories, experiences and confessions, their meanings intertwined, have emerged from her inner world. Intertwined? Intertwinedness is a recurring theme in her works, where, as a basic principle, the artist does not (or only rarely does) use figurative language, but rather turns to the language of basic lines, color and material, which combined into an abstract language speak of the artist’s thoughts and artistic desires. The line and the interplay of lines, grids and networks are ever-present visual devices in her work. Both the grid and the line are a symbol of interweaving and represent creativity and growth. It is within creativity and growth that a deeper meaning of the search for oneself within or through art, of expressing oneself through artistic means can be found. A net, a web, a rope – these forms suggestively express the sifting through and opening of one’s life and the world as a whole. On the one hand, webs and various interwinings act as guides through the corridors of one’s life and thus open up answers, but at the same time they also have an opposite, negative connotation, where they act as a tool of closure, of binding. When connected, these two poles of the same symbol produce black and white answers where pleasure and pain, health and illness, and ultimately life and death, are intertwined. Mira’s world typically turns away from gestural art.