Type: Embroidered painting
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2011
Edition: Unique
Size: Medium
Dimension: 84 x 107 cm | 33.1 x 42.1 in
Number of stitches: over 1.9 mio
Thread length: over 23 km | over 14.3 mi
Thread colours: 80
Development: over 700 person hours
Price: on request
About the artwork
The artist, Uroš Weinberger, took the image that was used as the origin point of his artwork, from the internet – it was a boy with a gun in his hand, an image from a toy box. Then he composed his artwork on two basic layers. The first, in the background, depicts a boy, without a weapon. The second, dominant layer is then superimposed, with a sketch image of the Homoid. This human-like being is a symbolic entity, representing a demon, a modern mechanised state employee – a soldier.
Multi-layered embroidery enhances layering of the motifs. Gentle colour transitions of threads in blurred underlayer with a boy image are placed in a strong contrast to the emphasized colours and strict sketching of the Homoid, perfectly replicating the artistic style of Uroš Weinberger.
About the artist
Uroš Weinberger‘s mechanism for building artworks is a palimpsest like montage of visual quotes. Many of them are widely recognised as they saturate the media orbit to which we are all exposed. He is an engaged post-media painter in a society of simulacrums and spectacle: »My paintings relate to that aspect of social perception of visual information which we receive via the media. […] Chronic conditions of tragedies, famine, disasters and wars in recurrent areas create a sense of repetition of information that lose function of the news (and novelty) and remain a pale shadows of events. […] These paintings do something else. Due to unusual encounters of images, they compel a viewer to become an active observer and with their own interpretations to complement and transform their content. And what is the most important is that they generate discourse,« Weinberger says The visual result is a discontinuous aggregate that can harbour a number of discordant or contradictory meanings, scooped from the rich, suggestive stew of popular culture.
Born in 1975 in Trbovlje. Earned a bachelor and master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. Also, an excellent guitarist in the band Moveknowledgement. He lives and works in Ljubljana and Novo mesto.
Features
Innovation of layering
We layer multiple colours of threads and so create rich embroidery and colour texture that is impossible to create with classic one-layer embroidery technique. By layering, we develop colour transitions and shadowing, by which we create multiple-colour surfaces, similar to pointillism painting.
Smooth transitions and shading
By intertwining threads of endless colours and creating colour transitions, we can shape soft shadows, make one surface transition into another and mix colours into an endless multitude of hues. This way, we can also recreate motives from photographs and sophisticated art paintings which wouldn’t be possible with classic embroidery technique, using vector surfaces.
Sophisticated colour calibration
Usually in embroidery, 10 or 20, maybe 30 colours of threads are used. We use around 1,000 colour hues and if a colour still doesn’t match the desired one, we create it by layering and colour transitions. We have digitally scanned colours of all threads by using a spectrograph, so we can colour match any colour from an original material or from CMYK, RGB or Pantone colour schemes.