Gaja Kobav

Even though the world of art today is very media oriented and constantly expanding, the field of ceramics still has a difficulty asserting itself as an art discipline. Many associate it only with the making of pretty pots or garish statues. But in the history of art there have been many artists who have achieved great success with the shaping and burning of soil.

Gaja Kobav directs her artistic strength and sense of design into clay, into this organic material, this primevalley, most elementary substance. It has become her bewitched bait. She uses it to create ceramics;both decorative and useful. But these characteristics are only consequential. The author first designs exhibits of specific artistic qualities and esthetic norms, creations, which reflect the abundance of her ideas and speak the silent language of her emotions, experience, visions and dreams. And everything that is beautiful can be used as a decoration. This way both demands combine into an unseparable whole and the created work of art acquires double purpose (a typical example of this is secession art).

The author's creative credo consists of big, simple, pure and even completely purified forms. Her works are authorial variations to all sorts of pots or vases, which come to life as unique and unrepeatable sculptural forms with an associative hint. Her creations are in a constant dialog between tradition and contemporaneity and between legacy and authorial, subjective principles. In the spirit of a modernised approach she brings classical forms to life, derives new ones and gives them an affirmative authorial disguise. And even though the chosen substance carries ancient memories inside it, and is the first material with which man created it remains always up-to-date and thus makes possible the author's expressing, which we can hold as completely contemporary. Gaja Kobav supplements the round like shapes with elegant necks and in doing so articulates the whole into a homogeneous presentful shape with a graceful posture. She transforms the soft and voluminous bench mat into a still softly designed, but a bit flattened and originally tilted ending part. Sometimes she opens the forms up very thoughtfully and other times she closes them up the same way. Often the whole is principally shaped and even re-shaped only by fragments. In the works of the artist there lives a dialog of contrasts, which passes over into a playful communication. In each creation we feel new matemorphosis or rather a fresh game of chosen shapes and the official guidelines of creativity.

Even in tehnical and technollogical way she stays classical and sticks to verified methods, although this is not a rule that she follows, but along it, she tries to research and to deepen her creativity. Into the game of creating she incorporates new cognition and she always loves to be surprised by new astonishments, which present her with unrepeatable visual effects. The ceramics is a special type of artistic modeling at which the author can only partly control the birth of the work of art. It is a combination of consciousness, intention and unconsciousness, the spontaneously appearing, originating as a result of numerous external factors. Something always stays inconceivable, in short, enigmatic. The forms, which are taking shape in the author's guided process with the use of snakes, have to be also embraced by fire that gives them firmness. Moldable, worm and moist material, this primary substance, which willingly subordinates under the sensible authors fingers, has to in the end change even its aggregation, for which Gaja Kobav uses burning at high temperatures (1000-1200 oC).

Although the leading role in the ceramics belongs to the form and the author tries subtle to listen to the material, she accentuates the surface with expression and in such way she creates a multilayered artistic note. By using different kinds of glazes she adds them more value in color, brilliance, structure and motion. This way her art gains on fascination and the clear form refines, revitalizes and vibrates in the bubbling of countless micro effects.
The author is ascetic in the use of forms and also in her use of color. In fact she uses only two colors, red and a specific dark color. And especially with this last color she covers the pots in blackness with patina, which gives a specific glittering look of old gold with its value and archaic. Through the red color glows the power of warmth, the objectivity of life and a secret hidden love (also to the artistic creativity). Both of the two chosen colors contain special nobleness and have a strong symbolical and suggestive meaning. With the glaze the author covers mostly all surfaces but also likes to leave some parts unglazed, so these parts speak in their own natural picturesqueness.

Nome nest omen.
The clay has a special meaning to Gaja. For her it is a primary material and she always devotes her creativity towards it. Gaja expresses her world of ideas through it and she forms it, reshapes it and transforms it into something that wears the author's sign, something that has her intimate note.
In a confusion of words the true meaning often gets lost and with abundant bursting of details the artistic creation can easily transform its self into daub. Gaja Kobav's creations originate from clearly expressed ideas, which she transforms into a physical shape with the limitation to the basic in which she follows the idea: ťless is moreŤ. The beauty lies namely in the simple things. Especially by using clean forms, the author tends to be persuasive and unique. The material she uses is simple and earthly, but it gives her the possibility and flexibility to shape it and change it and it also takes her into the world of art and elevates her upon her pedestal.