The Book of My Days – A Series of Drawings by Nejč Slapar from the Škofja Loka Museum’s Permanent Collection

Nejč Slapar (1945–2024) was a Slovenian visual artist, graphic designer and musician. In the 1970s, he was a member of various art groups (Ime, Studio Signum, Westeast). He worked in the fields of filmmaking, photography, music and visual arts. His oeuvre spans a wide range of different art mediums, including artistic actions, interventions in public space, drawing, painting, printmaking, spatial installations, and concrete and visual poetry. In the realm of visual arts, he experimented with creating optical effects on a two-dimensional surface and often used geometric forms. His work is characterised by meticulous, almost technical drawing and lengthy production processes.

Repetitive Self-Portrait

Slapar’s series The Book of My Days (1976) consists of uniform-format “diary drawings” made with black ink on white paper. The main subject of this series is the artist’s own image, conceived as a graphic sign that varies minimally from drawing to drawing – the artist occasionally mirrors it or transforms it slightly, placing it in different relationships with other elements on an empty background. Geometric shapes, graphic signs, individual letters, pictograms, animals and the outlines of a naked female body appear in various combinations alongside it.

The depicted motifs are mostly drawn with a thin, clean line, reminiscent of computer drawings. In this series, Slapar often combines elements that are usually incompatible – for instance, a female body with an abnormally enlarged finger instead of a head – and distorts the size ratios between them. Using such procedures, he creates images that defy logic and are almost akin to surrealist aesthetics. He exhibited the drawings in a seemingly arbitrary sequence. The series opens with an image of the artist with stylised wings – the artist as a butterfly – and ends with him depicted on the cross.

The Škofja Loka Museum keeps thirty-one drawings from this series. Fifteen of them were published by Slapar in 1976 in Snovanja (a culture supplement to the [Gorenjski] Glas newspaper) alongside his literary text Obsession. In the newspaper, he arranged the drawings in three columns of five black-bordered pictures, giving them the appearance of a filmstrip, a storyboard or a comic strip panel.

Artist Book

In 2018, Slapar’s artist book Nejč Slapar. The Book of My Days. 10 Mar 1945 (as written on the cover) was published under the auspices of the Škofja Loka Artists’ Association. The book contains drawings from Škofja Loka Museum’s permanent collection and fragmented prose and poetry typed on a typewriter, created during the same period as the series of drawings. The texts are stylistically and thematically similar to Slapar’s previously published work Obsession. Much like the visual part, the texts explore the artist’s unconscious through the experimental technique of automatic writing and free associations, creating an imaginary narrative intertwined with absurd and erotic elements.

Slapar supplemented his artist book, which combines drawings and literary materials, with two photographs taken during the shooting of his film The Ballad of a Dead Man (1973, production) and two manuscript pages, which visually round off the publication. The afterword was contributed by the curator Boštjan Soklič.

Slapar’s Work at the Exhibition

Slapar’s series The Book of My Days is spotlighted on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition For the Democratisation of Art – Revisited. Radical Artistic Practices in Yugoslavia (1960–1990), which is on view at the Škofja Loka Museum and features Slapar’s work, among others.