Sur Real 16

Since his youth, Branko Lenart has travelled widely across the world. He is often “on the road,” so to speak; and apparently he is most attracted by the southern hemisphere. He has always combined travelling with his other passion, which became his career – photography. Through the magnitude of images that Lenart took on his travels in the south, in particular around the Mediterranean and in South America, the artist is most likely revealed in his most genuine and primary essence – as an always inquisitive traveller with a magic device to capture light and memories. For this reason these images are first of all distinctively subjective; in a great many, in particular the older ones, we suspect that despite the simultaneous production the artist’s selection initially earmarked them for the “private use” box. Lenart has an enormous quantity of these visual impressions “from the road” and it is difficult to select among several hundred the thirty “best” for this exhibition.

Big Sur Real. Here, in this title, yet again a lucid play on words and meanings includes all or nearly all that is important to know about the selection of the photographs, and in a sense also about the photographer. Big Sur is a real place on the California shore, but it was turned into a myth and romanticised as a paradise of liberty, hedonism and counter-culture. It was widely romanticized, and many also moved there, including Henry Miller, Edward Weston, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, of course, Jack Kerouac, who found there a “cult of freedom and anarchy” to which he dedicated his homonymous novel. The extended area of a symbolic “real freedom”, paz real, is in Lenart’s view the entire Sur, the Latin South – as the “real south,” sur real. Simultaneously this evokes in him the feelings of sur-reality in a sense that reaches beyond the influence of surrealism on his work; in a way, it is an imaginative place of the artist’s “real light”, it is actually his luz real – the area of ultimate inspiration. It is no coincidence that his partner, his amor real, also comes from that part of the world which combines the artist’s work and life in an inseparable entirety.

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Branko Lenart (Ptuj, Slovenia, 1948). He emigrated with his family in 1954 to Graz, Austria. In 1968 he became member of the avant-garde art society Forum Stadtpark, Graz. From 1972 – 1978, he studied pedagogy in Graz. In 1980, he was Artist-in-Residence at Apeiron Workshops, Millerton, N. Y. Further studies in La Rochelle, Arles, Oxford, Rome, Paris, London, USA and Israel. He is a founding member and was the chairman (1994 – 2007) of the cultural society Artikel-7 for Austrian Styrians/The Pavel House. In 2001, he cooperated with the project “Inge Morath’s Last Journey”, travelling exhibition and book (preface by Arthur Miller), Prestel 2003. He has been teaching photography at the College of Art and Design (1979 – 2007) and at the Technical College (1996 – 2003) in Graz.