Ciril Horjak has belonged among most recognizable authors of Slovenian caricature and comic strip art for several years. He is also well known as a long-standing co-worker of the Večer newspaper’s Saturday supplement with the title V soboto (On Saturday). At the retrospective exhibition, his portrait caricatures and title pages, which have adorned the Večer newspaper’s Saturday supplement for several years will be displayed.

Ciril Horjak, also known under the artistic name Dr Horowitz, was born in 1975 in Slovenj Gradec. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana with his thesis of a comic strip under professors Dr Jožef Muhovič and Dr Milan Erič. At the end of the 1980s he was awarded first prize at the Youth Author Comic Strip Competition in Novi Sad, Serbia, twice in two consecutive years. On an international level, his works have been presented mostly under the auspices of the Stripburger revue. His first comic strip album Ride (The Bends) was published by Stripburger in November 2003. As part of the Stripburger academy, he also created the first Slovenian comic strip manual titled Najmanjša velika enciklopedija stripa (The Smallest Large Encyclopedia of Comic Strips).Together with his dentist Rok Jurič, he created an educational comic strip in 2014 about dental treatment called Endodontostrip, while in 2016, he co-created a comic strip series on economic topics for the Delo newspaper with Jure Stojan called Striponomija. As a visiting professor, he teaches comic strip drawing at several Slovenian faculties, he narrates fairy tales for children and adults at narration festivals, works with youth with autism and runs literary workshops as part of the ViA project by the Slovenian Book Agency. Since 2007, he has been working at the Večer newspaper, for which he created more than 1,000 illustrations in over 570 weeks. Some of them are shown at the exhibition.

The self-confident strokes of Ciril Horjak’s drawings make clear that the drawings never just served the text. From the very beginning they demanded – and got, as well – at least the same weight as the words which they supposed to illustrate. Dr Jure Stojan

The project was financially supported by the Municipality of Maribor.