Type: Embroidered painting
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2012
Edition: Unique
Size: Large
Dimension: 166 x 137 cm | 65.4 x 53.9 in
Number of stitches: over 6.8 mio
Thread length: over 82 km | over 51 mi
Thread colours: 40
Development: over 1700 person hours
Price: on request
About the artwork
What could be more exciting than a visual realisation of our dreams, like a turn of camera obscura, like admission to our subconscious, into the only legitimate reality? Let’s watch the barely tangible spill of sand from one bulb of the hourglass to the other, and we will eventually find ourselves in the Doge’s Dream, where inside a Venetian arcade building gently clouded sky magically glows. We suddenly wake up from reality, as if from an unyielding empirical armour of a nightmare into a lost children’s paradise. The buildings become mere backdrops, onto which we cast our renaissance credo like everyday clothes. We set out, in an unknown breeze chilling our bare skin, towards the vague, indistinctive, but beautifully fulfilled horizon.
Using a special embroidery technique, the building stands out, as if a Venetian facade was truly built around a clear blue sky. The concept, colour combinations and the philosophy of layering are identical to what Aleksij Kobal would use when painting in his native oil technique. And the embroidered texture adds a whole new dimension, a dreamy blur, undefined and yet even more physical.
About the artist
Aleksij Kobal is a painter of landscapes that can be vividly imagined but not experienced physically. Of impossible buildings that are seen but cannot be entered. Of atmospheric clouds turning into mists. Of spaces floating in the abyss of the mind. Everything is in complete silence perhaps or in droning echoes of memories. He is a painter of visions that are propelled gently and intimately, yet are powerfull mentaly and spiritualy.
Born in 1962 in Koper. He graduated and completed his masters studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 2016 he received the Prešeren Foundation award, the highest national honor for artistic expression in Slovenia.
Features
Extra big formats
The main problem of big format embroideries are material contractions that make it difficult to correctly position all the details of a motif. To overcome such deformations and other problems, over decades of creating big embroideries, we have developed technical and software solutions that enable us to deliver perfect embroideries of any dimensions and number of stitches.
Extraordinary number of stitches
In a classic embroidery, the number of stitches is somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000, and is limited by stretching and contracting of materials. By overcoming this limitations, we are able to make embroideries with millions of stitches which enables us to produce photorealistic embroideries and recreate any painting of any artistic style.
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.