Like to Like (II) | Berlin 2007

LIKE TO LIKE (II)

ARTISTS: ATTILA CSÖRGŐ, ALEXANDER GUTKE, GORAN PETERCOL, TOBIAS PUTRIH, NIKA ŠPAN, GORAN TRBULJAK

Exhibition: December 15, 2007 – January 26, 2008

The second part of the group exhibition LIKE TO LIKE, with selected works by the artists represented by the gallery, focuses on artistic responses to scientific phenomena and representations in the fields of optics, kinetics, computer technology and graphics.

Attila Csörgő’s Spherical Vortex traces the path of a light source by combining three separate rotations of different velocity. Starting from a single point, the light source creates a spiral of growing radius, describing an ‘orbit’. When it reaches its most extreme limit, the light moves back in a spiral form to its starting point. The three exhibited photographs result from different exposure times, and visualise a light path that is invisible to the naked eye.

Alexander Gutke’s work Whirlpool (to be seen as photographic documentation in the exhibition) also deals with rotation. In 2000, for the exhibition Viva Scanland, Gutke placed a glass of water with a whirlpool on the counter of a bar in Belfast. However, the water doesn’t spill over, but always remains just below the rim of the glass. Stretch (2000-2007), comparable to a photographic representation, fixes one moment in the stretching of a fluid material in a sculptural form. An occurrence that exists in reality – the spreading out of a puddle of water – is imitated and ‘frozen’ as an object at a certain point of its temporal course.

Fine Sciencies is the title of an animated film by the artist Nika Špan. The film is based on the Internet simulation of a computer program by Dan Reznik, its soundtrack is the result of compressing the sound of the digital camera during recording. Under the same title, Nika Špan has produced a series of works on paper. The source of these works are charts found in the Internet on various scientific themes, which are chosen by Špan according to purely aesthetic criteria, and only minimally modified.

The starting point for Macula, Series B by Tobias Putrih was an attempt to trace a perfect circle by hand. The repeated retracing of the circular shape leads to increasing imprecision, so that, eventually, an irregular, seemingly organic shape emerges. This process is then reconstituted in three dimensions as a series of sculptures made of concentrically overlapping cardboard elements. Each of these sculptures has an individual form, and having an outer thickness of only 1cm, becomes a solid body or a filigree transparent structure depending on the angle of view. At the same time, Macula is also a metaphor for the archetype of a model.

A bulb blinds the viewer who is placed frontally before the work Hole (2007) by Goran Petercol. The small circular opening in the shade of an opaque white glass lamp is positioned at the exact point of the light source inside. In a work from the series Shadows, Sjene (113), from 1994, a complex structure of light and shadow appears on the surface and the surroundings of a plate, behind which mirror facets are rowed. The starting point for Petercol’s work is the precise observation and positioning of the transcendental object within processes derived from Conceptual Art, Minimal Art and analytical painting of the 70s.

In Untitled (1988) by Goran Trbuljak, a canvas is covered with a conversion filter for camera light (85ND3). Trbuljak has previously experimented with painting without a brush – here, he brings the colour in front of and no longer on the canvas using a material actually intended for camera techniques. During the late 60s in Zagreb, Trbuljak was a leading proponent of Conceptual Art, focussing on institution critique and the questioning of the nature of the work of art. In 1971, for example, he only showed a poster with his portrait and some general information about the exhibition accompanied by the text: “I do not wish to show anything new and original.”