VENTURE I
ARTISTS: ATTILA CSÖRGŐ, OLAFUR ELIASSON, VADIM FISHKIN, ALEXANDER GUTKE, IRWIN, MAGNUS LARSSON, YURI LEIDERMAN, KAZIMIR MALEVICH 1985, GORAN PETERCOL, TADEJ POGAČAR & P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MARJETICA POTRČ, TOBIAS PUTRIH, GUIA RIGVAVA
March 6, 2004 – April 17, 2004
Galerija Gregor Podnar will open its premises on Savska street 34 in Kranj with the group exhibition Venture. The art works on the exhibition present the majority of fair and exhibition programme that we successfully presented on international level in the last three years.
Attila Csörgő presents photographs of fascinating light effects, generated by his sophisticated mobile constructions. The Beautifully shaped, semi-spherical silhouettes form the Spherical Vortex series (1999 – 2000), stemming from a rotating light bulb, can in fact only be recorded with a camera lens. Attila Csörgő last year participated in Instambul biennale, his first exhibition in Slovenia was in Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana in 1999 (together with Antal Lakner).
Vadim Fiškin’s work Molecul (Marble/Straw), open to diverse interpretations, communicates the relations between science, personal experience, desire and imagination, metaphysics and pragmatism, artificial and real and finds subtle linkage that arouses the viewers’ curiosity, yet leaves them guessing as to its ultimate. (Lívia Páldi) Vadim Fiškin works in various media, from photography to drawing, from c-print and sculptural works to installations with technically demanding devices.
The video loop Transition (A 1978 Pontiac Firebird driving through a forest of pinetress) by Alexander Gutke shows a 1978 Pontiac Firebird, driving along a forest road on the Swedish countryside. The trees lining the sides of the road are mirrored in the cars paint as it drifts by. The sequence is similar to the kind of transitional scene in a film, used to describe a movement between two places, two events or maybe a scene describing a movement, a shift, in a more symbolical sense, a change of mind or a change of directions.
Since the mid-80s the artist group Irwin has been working with various media, from painting to public art from sculptural works and installations to publishing. With their ‘retro principle’ method of work the group combines different motives and signs from the field of political and art movements in history and transforms them into a visual field that re-contextualises and deconstructs various ideologies of political and cultural domains. In Galerija Gregor Podnar some smaller works of the Irwin members will be presented.
Magnus Larsson explores the in-between space of traditional portrait painting and contemporary media image. While working precisely and time-consuming with oil on canvas he mixes elements from historical portrait painting, fashion images, and cartoon. With his paintings (Portrait- Untitled) of androgyny figures Magnus Larsson evokes a state of suspense between the individual as a demand of a portrait and the collectively consummated media image.
Juri Leiderman is a writer and an artist. He is interested in rethinking and examining a very self-referential concept of art, as the origins of most of his works derive from stories and occurrences connected to his very personal life experiences and obsessions, and transformed into a sophisticated system of visual signs and codes. On the exhibition you will see drawings that represent into art signs translated segments of his texts.
We also present selected works of an anonymous author that started to create in 1985 as Kazimir Malevic. Zdenka Badovinac, director of Moderna galerija writes about him: “The entire context of the artist[s] that can be associated with the Anonymous cannot be systemised within the dominant institutional framework. And as I wonder whether there is any possibility at all of avoiding the manipulations of the market and institutions, I realise that the only solution is the sacrifice of one’s own name and identity.”
Goran Petercol’s work is the continuous process of a self-contained system; a process that in its structural opens – one partial element always tells us something about the whole, and which remains elusive – had already become apparent in his earlier works. His drawings from the Copying series demonstrate their historical affinity to 70s analytical painting. In this series Goran Petercol uses his earlier, gestural drawings as models, but the way he depicts these motives deviates from the original Informal style. He translates an existing system (of values) into an opposing code and calls this process the ‘recovery of form’. Also some newer works from the series Cups (2001) will be presented.
Marjetica Potrč is interested in the contemporary city as “…a complex and multi-layered spatial and social organism’. Her works reflect the fragmented and contradictory experience of urban space. The historical centres of cities, with their architectural moments and famous sights, have in a sense become unreal, they have turned into an image, a spectacle, and they function as a Disneyland.” – Igor Zabel. We are showing works from her series Animal Sightings (2001, ink-jet prints), first presented at her solo exhibition in Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in autumn 2001.
Photographic works Potujoča globusa (Traveling globes) of Tadej Pogačar are prototypes of his concept P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of contemporary art, that he conceived at the end of 1990 as a parallel art institution, he named that way in 1993. The globes anticipate flexible settlement of the Museum into existed organisms. They travel into wild places that are culturally weak pre-coded (backyards and natural landscapes).
Possible but Abstract (Football Player with a Ball) that consists of objects, animation, and drawings is a new work by Tobias Putrih, which Galerija Gregor Podnar produced last year at the occasion of Artissima 10, The international Art Fair in Turin at the Present Future section. The work is linked to the concept of tetragonal structures – based on scientific references to the work of A.G. Bell, Buckminster Fuller and d’Arby – and most lately connected with computer animation programmes. Tobias Putrih locates this objects, animation & drawings as an in-between experience of intimate artistic activity and a playful approach towards modernistic models and a low-tech production of virtual reality.
The video work Are They Rich from 1995 by Guia Rigvava shows a static view on a busy street in Munich. The appearance of the people passing by in the video is rather accidental and casual. Every time when someone passes by the voice of the artist poses the question “Are They Rich?”. This work can be connected to the very social and economical changes that Guia Rigvava experienced moving from post-Soviet Russia into a new environment. Hence, the work bears a multi-layered metaphoric reading: Are They Rich in mind…