Podgornik Dušan

Dušan Podgornik (Maribor, 24 October 1956 – Sv. Marina, 28 March 2010)

Dušan Podgornik, one of the long-standing associates of the Maritime Museum Piran, was academically educated painter, graphic artist, photographer, designer, calligrapher and diver. After graduating from the School of Design in Ljubljana, he opted for further studies in Belgrade, where he graduated, in 1980, from the Academy of Applied Arts. Eventually, he moved to Koper, where he continued his artistic path.

In the Maritime Museum Piran, Dušan Podgornik left his mark largely as a designer and photographer. He designed numerous books, publications, permanent and periodic exhibitions as well as leaflets, invitations, posters, postcards and greeting cards. He created the logos of the Maritime Museum, the Museum of Salt-making and the Street Museum. The numerous Maritime Museum’s exhibitions and publications were further enriched by his original photographs. 

In 1985, he designed the catalogue of the Tona House ethnological collection. In 1988, he participated with his numerous photographs in the preparation of the Maritime Museum’s interdisciplinary exhibition entitled the Sečovlje Saltpans Yesterday - Today - Tomorrow. For this exhibition, the museum received the Murko Award in 1989 for top professional achievements in the field of ethnology in Slovenia. Podgornik designed and contributed a number of photographs for all catalogues of the Museum of Salt-making. When the single storey warehouse along the north bank of the Giassi Canal was renovated in 2002 next to the Museum of Salt-making, its interior design was entrusted to Dušan, who put his special artistic stamp on the museum exhibition. With the aid of his own photographs, he correlated the interior of the museum collection and its contents with the beauty of the exterior, i.e. the natural and cultural landscape of the Fontanigge saltpans. When the Museum of Salt-making received the Europa Nostra European Union Award in 2004 for its endeavours to preserve cultural heritage, Dušan, too, was proud of this joint award.

In 1991, Podgornik took part in the design of the exhibition and catalogue entitled Ressel and Maritime Enterprise, in 1993 in a major interdisciplinary exhibition and publication The Port of Piran From the Old Harbour to its Current Image, and in 1996 in the renovation of the permanent collection Slovenian Seafarers 1918–1945. A very special challenge for Podgornik was the exhibition with naval and military contents from the period of iron ships set up in the room with wall and ceiling paintings from the end of the 19th century, which he undertook with great pleasure and ardour. A couple of years later, he also participated in the reconstruction of the entire Maritime Museum’s first floor, where a collection of early maritime history is now on display. He designed the collections of the Gruber models, figureheads, marine paintings and votive images, and the collection of shipbuilding and the Austro-Hungarian Navy.

In Izola, he embarked on designing the Street Museum, the Canteen and the Collection of Ship Modelling, for which he received, together with other artists, the Valvazor Award, presented in Slovenia for special achievements in the sphere of museums. In this particular period he also designed, apart from permanent exhibitions, the museum publications written by the museum professionals: Figureheads, Encounters with the Sea, With a Barge to Trieste and Petrvs Coppvs Fecit - De summa totius orbis with its later reprint.

The last exhibition at the Maritime Museum Piran, in which Dušan Podgornik took part, was the periodic exhibition titled Rex - Glitter, Ruin, Revived Memories, set up in 2008. On this occasion, we got to know Dušan much better also as a diver as well as an excellent underwater photographer and cameraman. At the end of 2009, he set about designing two books, The Salt Routes and Between Waves and Clouds. However, he saw these two books only in electronic form. Soon after he took the books to the printing house, he was swallowed up by the depths of the Adriatic Sea while diving.

Nadja Terčon, Snježana Karinja