October Forest Light Painting

Gregor Pratneker (1973) started painting in the 1990s. He lives and works in Maribor. In 2006 he graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Education in Maribor with his diploma thesis Painted Cityscapes of Maribor. Between 2007 and 2012 he was a postgraduate student at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he also received his Master's degree in 2012 with the thesis Abstraction and deformation of shapes in my painting (dr. Muhovič, Lenardič). In his recent creative period, he has been focusing mainly on landscapes - forests, which can be painted plein air or in the studio. In 2013 he won the first prize of the May Salon awarded by the ZDSLU (Federation of Slovene Artists' Associations), and in 2014 he managed to convince the French jury of the Autumn Salon in Paris with his painting Winter Morning, which had been awarded the first prize by the ZDSLU the year before. Since then, he has exhibited regularly at all three major Parisian salons: Autumn Salon, Salon des Beaux-Arts and Salon des Artistes Françaises. In December 2019 he was awarded the Eugene Boudin award (named after the famous French landscape painter) at the Salon des Beaux-Arts, Louvre, for his painting Spring in the Mountains. In February 2020, he received the Mention Prize at the Salon des Artistes Françaises, Grand Palais. In April 2024, he received the Glazer's Charter Prize, awarded by the Municipality of Maribor for cultural achievements. In March 2025, he was artist in residence in Vienna for the painting project Carpathian Bees.