Miha Murn is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose work bestrides the intersections of the analogue and digital worlds. He has given himself the task of producing artworks in seemingly all creative mediums, not just traditional painting and sculpture, but collage, assemblage, drawing, ready-mades, and photography. His work, like art history itself, then progresses onto the more contemporary scene of digital graphics, computer-generated imagery, and 3D inspired installations (all of Murn’s installations are angular, mechanistic, and beautifully crafted). The entirety of his oeuvre is a tribute to his inexhaustible creative imagination, and to his engagement with the contemporary world.

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Considering his work as a totality, one can discern a high degree of intertextuality as Murn draws on anything and everything that excites him and that he finds relevant. To him, the world is a multifaceted, contradictory, and sometimes discombobulating place, and his art reflects the frenetic, dynamic, and colourful times in which we live. But his creative output also exemplifies the psychological engagement of an artist who is trying to make sense of our complex world where Artificial Intelligence and the digital sphere sometimes appears to be replacing human interactions. His cultural lineage is broad and wide as he draws upon architecture, iconography, press cuttings, royalty, and the sometimes-kitsch fetishisation of consumer goods. Murn’s reference points have no restrictions and no bounds, and his work eliminates reason, judgement, and restraint, which are all discarded as he embraces the contemporary world in a whirl of dynamic colour, emotional response, and constructions of significant form.

 

Miha Murn’s paintings are full of life, zest, and energy. Note the frenzied use and application of colour in his dynamic world where a free-for-all melee of screaming imagery jolts the senses. He vigorously deploys iconographic subject matter which imbue his canvasses with dramatic visions and vivid leitmotifs. These fall into one of two camps; either the purely abstract, or the more physiognomic fragmentation of corporeality in an avowedly synthetic cubist style. He clearly draws as much inspiration from Picasso as he does from Pollock. He is even chancing his arm as a photographer; and here we note his apprehension about the discombobulation we all sometimes feel in an urban environment which can be alienating. He reflects upon the social milieu of the city, and in his work, there are mere indications of humanity, but ostensibly, we discern only oblique and obscure fragments of society and a sometimes bleak and dystopian aesthetic. I was taken by certain elements in his imagery that are sometimes reflected back through the prism of a window pane or mediated through glass.

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If Miha Murn was not so infused with business success, and any number of high-level accomplishments outside the art world, he would no doubt be regarded as something of a flaneur, that highly observant urban wanderer, as he glides about the city rationalising, analysing, contextualising, representing, and philosophising about his place in the world, and what it means to be a human in the twenty first century. This is an artist who is grappling with the modern world in all its multi-faceted complexity, and one who draws inspiration from an incredible range of sources. But this is also an artist who yearns for an identity, a style, an aesthetic which can appreciably be acknowledged as his own. Until his style develops to this point, we have the unalloyed pleasure of enjoying his art works which burst out of the canvas with such incredible vigour, life and energy.