Lojze Logar was born in Mežica, Slovenia in 1944. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 1968, and then specialised in graphic design with professors Riko Debenjak and Marjan Pogačnik two years later. In 1974, a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship saw him travel to Germany to study under Professor Engelman. He became a professor himself in 1990, after a period working as a freelance artist, and taught graphic design, drawing and painting at his alma mater.
During this period, the Slovenian evolution of pop art, ‘New Figural Art’, was the dominant trend in Logar’s native country. He participated in its development as a leading figure, and his geometrical shapes initiated a new era for the local scene. With this freedom of expression came experimentation with posters, photographs, reproductions, newspaper headlines and clippings, television – everything was in reach and fair game.
Eras came and went, and with them styles and aesthetics. Conceptualism and radical expressionism led him away from New Figural Art and the early 1980s marked a turn toward almost exclusive abstraction. Logar’s approach was one of monochromatic absolutism: black on black compositions. Later in the decade, he inaugurated his most well-known cycle; The Gardens of David, which culminated in the adoption of erotic and explicit motifs. Variations on black led way to vivid colours that relegated black to the borders of his images. The 1990s introduced the Intermezzozoic period cycle, and with it, a renewed colour palette. He resumed his monochrome painting, still flirting with abstraction, and used turquoise blue as his central colour of this period, which he later expanded to purple. In a later cycle initiated in 2001, Sarcophaga U.S., Logar developed a more politically and socially charged approach, using green and purple as the basic colours. An avid draughtsman, the latter part of his career saw the artist, diminished by illness, return to his practice with the Angeli series, which consists entirely of works on paper.
In 1987 he received the Prešeren Fund Award.
Logar passed away in 2014.
