THE SOWER
1984/2009, acrylic on felt canvas, 280 x 195 cm
Unique work
Instrumentality of the State Machine – The Sower, painted, signed, and stamped by Laibach
This is the enlarged interpretation of Laibach's 1984 painting "Sower by Night" (original in private collection). The sower is one of Laibach's most iconic motifs from the 1980s. It was first used by the group in the 1981 painting "Gefunden/Sower" (in a private collection) and many times later in several other paintings and illustrations.
The sower motif was very popular in art history, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. A famous example is the Millet sower of 1850. Vincent van Gogh was strongly inspired by Milet and imitated the sower in several of his own paintings, but transformed the image by using lighter colours. The sower was also very popular in Slovenian painting. Laibach therefore used it as a knowing reference to typical international motif.
The present painting itself was created in 2008–2009 as part of a larger installation, entitled “Instrumentality of the State Machine”, which Laibach first presented in this setting in 2009 at their extensive retrospective exhibition “AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST – RECAPITULATION”, at the Muzeum Sztuki Gallery of Modern Art in Łódź, Poland, and later as well in an exhibition in Zagreb, at Dom HDLU 2011, entitled “AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST – Ceci n'est pas Malevich”.
Created by members of Laibach, signed with four names (Eber, Saliger, Dachauer and Keller), and stamped with the group's emblem as well as their collective signature.
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Laibach first presented the motifs of the Red Districts in 1980 at the Delavski dom (Workers' Home) culture centre in Trbovlje – at an exhibition that never took place (because it was banned by the local municipal authorities). Subsequently, Laibach presented the same motifs at their first exhibitions in Belgrade (Srećna galerija, 1981), Ljubljana (ŠKUC Gallery, 1982), and Zagreb (PM Gallery, 1983).
In the following decades, the group showed various variations of the Red Districts in some of their major exhibitions. In 2009, eight motifs were printed on aluminium plates and presented at retrospectives of their visual work in Łódź (Muzeum Sztuki, 2009), Maribor (UGM, 2011), Zagreb (HDLU, 2011), as well as in Olomouc (Galerie Caesar, 2016) and some other galleries.
The original linocuts represent historical motifs from the so-called Red Districts, as the industrial basin of Slovenia in the Zasavje region is called, which encompasses the towns of Trbovlje, Zagorje, and Hrastnik, i.e. the environmental area where the band Laibach were formed in 1980. These ‘industrial’ motifs became part of the basic aesthetic content of Laibach, which never denied their industrial-cultural origins, and after the formal establishment of the broader umbrella art formation Neue Slowenische Kunst (1984–1992), these motifs were adopted and appropriated from Laibach by other NSK groups, most notably by the Irwin painting group.