Image: Maribor Art Gallery
Maribor Art Gallery will open a new exhibition by Dora Benčevič at UGM Šop on 9 July, presenting a selection of the young artist’s recent work across drawing, printmaking and painting. The show, titled “If I were to title my work simply as the product of my dreams, would that seem too simple to you?”, runs at UGM Šop, Strossmayerjeva ulica 6, until 23 August 2026. The opening is scheduled for 18:00 and the exhibition is curated by Živa Kleindienst.
According to the gallery, the exhibition brings together a varied group of works that introduce Benčevič for the first time in this venue. The selection includes digital and original sketches, abstract drawings, prints and a large painting, spanning small and medium formats as well as a more expansive canvas. The gallery says the presentation is meant as a homage to the breadth of the artist’s interests and practices, and it foregrounds the range of media in which she works.
Benčevič, born in 2000, moves between illustration, comics, drawing, animation and tattooing. The gallery describes her practice as one shaped by everyday life and visual experience: people, fleeting interactions, humorous coincidences and impressions gathered on her travels. The works on view are said to move from figurative scenes that comment playfully on ordinary situations to fragile abstract drawings that can stand on their own as images. Some of these drawings are also translated into tattoos, extending the work from paper to skin.
The exhibition text also places emphasis on Benčevič’s use of colour and serial formats. The show includes multicoloured silkscreens and a larger painting in which vibrating layers of colour form what the gallery describes as a portrait of the artist’s emotions, continually shifting and shaping her experience of being. The page for the exhibition lists works including “Sanje so velika skleda” and the diptych “Vdih” and “Izdih,” alongside an original drawing titled “Sanja.”
Benčevič completed art secondary school in Koper in 2019. That same year she illustrated the visual identity for the Days of Poetry and Wine festival and created her first mini comic, “Esenca umetnika,” published by Stripburger/Forum Ljubljana in 2020. Since then, the gallery says, she has shown work independently and in group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. For Maribor audiences, the exhibition offers an early institutional platform for an artist whose practice already spans several visual languages.
The opening at UGM Šop also sits within a broader summer programme at Umetnostna galerija Maribor. The gallery is running summer creative workshops for children and is also drawing attention to the forthcoming opening of the Mestna hiša kulture Rotovž, the new cultural centre in Maribor’s historic core where UGM will operate alongside the library, cinema and café. Against that backdrop, the Benčevič exhibition underscores the gallery’s continued role in introducing emerging artists while linking exhibition activity to wider plans for the city’s cultural infrastructure.
