Eva Mlinar (1985) completed her studies of art history at the Faculty of Arts and visual communications at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. He works in various fields of art, with an emphasis on book illustration and theatre. She designed posters for theatre stages in New York, designed the covers for the MGL theatre’s library, currently she is in charge of the visual image of the Anton Podbevšek Theater’s performances in Novo mesto. She has contributed her illustrations to many books and magazines, and regularly collaborates with the publishing house VigeVageKnjige, the MGL theatre and the museum Wellcome Collection in London. She often introduces elements of collage into the illustration and is a great fan of old maps, the Middle East and medieval times.
The Bête Noire Vignettes + The Architecture Diaries
The illustrations of the “The Bête Noire Vignettes” are from the book of the same name, a joint project with the writer and playwright Eva Mahkovič. It is a literary-visual collection of grotesques of an elusive genre that has been created during the past eight years, was published by VigeVageKnjige last year and received the highest award of the Slovenian Book Fair – the Book of the Year 2019. Illustrations drawn from various sources and from the fragments that they take over, they create their own, vividly fantastic world. They are made with mixed media, where collage has the strongest expression and most fragments come from historical graphics and medieval illuminated manuscripts.
A series of collage illustrations “The Architecture Diaries” was created for the exhibition “Living with Buildings” of the Wellcome Collection in London. The illustrations explore the positive and negative influences of architecture on human physical and mental health.
Round Table of Picky Readers
The illustration for the wall in front of the Kranj’s Town Library is based on motifs of one of the most famous artists from Kranj, the painter Marij Pregelj. The basis for the composition is his painting from a series of his tables and groups of people sitting at tables: the Pompeian Table, from which these collage fragments of modernist figures also come from. Other collage elements are motifs that Pregelj devoted a lot of attention to – various female figures. The motif is reinterpreted in a modern visual language, combining the contrast of two-dimensional surfaces and collage while preserving the colour scheme with flashes of strong red colour.