Marko Pogačnik[needs IPA] (born August 11, 1944) is a
Slovenian artist and author.
Background
Pogačnik studied at the
Academy of Arts in
Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, where he graduated in 1967. He was a co-founder of the
neo-avantgarde artistic movement
OHO,[1] members of which were also
Tomaž Šalamun and
Slavoj Žižek. From the 1980s, he embraced a
holistic vision of art. He claims to have developed a method of earth healing similar to
acupuncture by using pillars and positioning them on so called 'lithopuncture' points of the landscape.[1]
In 1998, together with his daughter Ana, he founded the Lifenet movement, which has been described by scholars as a "typical
New Age" group.[2]
He lives and works in the village of
Šempas in the lower
Vipava Valley. In the last decade, the town of
Nova Gorica, in which municipal territory he resides, has commissioned a number of public monuments from Pogačnik, most notably the monument to the 1000 years of the first mention of
Gorica and
Solkan, which stands in the town's central public square.
Since 2008, a group of his monuments and
birch trees, titled the Hologram of Europe (
Slovene: Hologram Evrope), stands at the crossroad of
Tivoli Street (Tivolska cesta) and
Slovene Street (Slovenska cesta) in Ljubljana.[1]