HR

7.9.2010. Tuesday / opening event / 18.00 – 20.00
7. – 29.9.2010. / Barrel Gallery

Croatian Association of Artists
Trg zrtava fašizma bb

Curator: Branko Franceschi

The new installation designed specifically for the space of Croatian Association of Artists, the Mestrovic Pavilion, combines as it is typical already in the works of the Argentinean artist Osvaldo Romberg, architectural elements, text, collages ,video, sound etc. This time, a homage to Le Corbusier’s Phillips pavilion in the Brussels Universal Exposition of 1958 (The artist was 20 years old when he visits the pavilion and was shaped by the overwhelming impression the work did on him!!!!) The Eye of the Fly ,the name of the new installation, seeks to present contemporary dilemmas and dynamics between globalism and ethnicity.

As we know, the eye of the fly has 4000 facets. What does it see? Does it see one truth divided by 4000 or 4000 different truths????

The installation 7 meters high and 27 meters long consist of a pavilion done with cardboard pipes and paper through which viewers circulate. Three projectors on the outside of the pavilion will project moments, selected by chance and underlined by the artist, of a history of mankind that will aphoristically create a sarcastic relation between society and justice. An audio sequence will progress through a history of music that will accelerate to create the sound of the fly as well of periods of tension between the images, the text and the movies…

The pavilion will allow a free circulation at the viewer’s desired pace during which many images and sounds will be experienced. The full circulation of images and sounds will be approximately 10 minutes.

The Eye of the Fly is a new piece by Romberg, influenced a lot by the space which is going to be contend by, a Pantheon like circular high space, which will give the viewer the sensation to be enveloped in to layers of architectural space: one real - the building and the other fictional of the paper structure in which he will be exposed to a total work of visual and audio sensual stimuli.

Osvaldo Romberg is a Professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was born in Buenos Aires and lives and works in New York, Philadelphia, and Isla Grande, Brazil. At Slought Foundation, he has curated retrospectives on artists such as William Anastasi, Hermann Nitsch, Dennis Oppenheim, and Gunter Brus. He has exhibited widely as an artist at institutions including the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Sudo Museum, Tokyo; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Jewish Museum, New York; the XLI Venice Biennial, Israel Pavilion; the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, among others. Theater of Transparency, an exhibit of his video installations at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2008, was co-curated by Aaron Levy and Gunther Holler-Schuster and travels in 2009 to the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, the Neue Galerie, Graz, and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe.

Exhibition was made possible thanks to the grants by Ministry of Culture Republic of Croatia and City of Zagreb