Maribor born fine arts teacher Gregor Pratneker became involved in painting soon after graduating from high school in 1992. Out of his strong sympathy for visual creation he later decided to study at the Art Pedagogy Department of the Maribor Faculty of Education. His early creative period is marked by figural compositions, mostly portraits and autonomous nudes based on surfacing, slightly geometrically stylised formations with emphasised lyricism. In 2006, Gregor Pratneker graduated with his theme of the historical review of Maribor painting townscapes including a series of his own townscapes. He independently exhibited the latter in the Media Nox Gallery of the Maribor Youth Cultural Centre and at the Exhibition Hall of the Maribor Faculty of Education. The artist experiences his home town as a lively, constantly developing organism, which on one hand he interprets objectively—recognisably having a firmly conceived framework based on photographic outlays, and on the other subjectively, as an intimate, imaginative vision of mutually intertwining architecture and landscape elements within the restless network of a hatched and lined system. The glowing light is manifested through variegated shades of colour and rich nuances having the effect of a "fatamorgana"-like scintillation (complementary contrast). In the symbolically reduced coloration, warm casts of architecture (red, orange, yellow) prevail, while, as a contrast, the blue sky and green vegetation move away into the distance. A pretty uncommon effect is the dark, evening or night town scenes, especially the Old Bridge with glimmering lamps associating with surrealistic dream-like visions. The undisturbing absence of human figures proves, with some strongly stylised and hardly noticeable exceptions, that Pratneker's Maribor can also exist independently, as a living genius loci which to each person appears in a slightly changed image. Also belonging to Pratneker's favourite landscape and townscape motifs are depictions of Slovene Styrian churches, where he blends the contrasts between the geometrically stylised forms of architecture and the organic shapes of nature forms. Pratneker's latest creative period is marked by the frequent participation at art colonies, where he can paint landscape motifs en-plain-air, meaning directly copying nature. Simultaneously he is attracted to floral still-lifes, above all sunflowers, tulips, daffodils and roses, where he expresses himself differently, with a synthetic formation and a more explicit contour. In Pratneker's extensive painting opus we can see his proneness to depicting people and nature, as well as to "portraying" urban constructions which are not hostile towards people but radiate a pleasant warmth of an intimate shelter and therefore often associate with anthropomorphous or any biomorphous forms.

Mario Berdič, Art Critic

In Maribor, March 2007