ANA VIVODA
Recycled intimately

29.4. - 23.5.2010.

Opening; 29.4. at 7pm

Karas Gallery
Praska 4, Zagreb
HDLU

DRAGO TRUMBETAŠ AND HIS WORLD

ARCHIPELAGO GASTARBEITER

RING GALLERY

03/02/2010 -03/28/2010

HDLU, TRG ŽRTAVA FAŠIZMA bb

CURATOR: NENAD POPOVIĆ

Archipelago Gastarbeiter includes exhibition and the side events like literary evenings, panel discussions and the film screenings. The exhibition consists of 120, 70 x 50 cm large panels that combine famous Trumbetas’s drawings with photo documentation, newspaper clips, various administrative documents, working permits spanning from 1968 to 1985 and altogether outlining peculiar conditions of being a gastarbeiter - an immigrant worker in the Germany of that era. The panels vividly depict all the sources of Trumbetas’s inspiration and, simultaneously, to the viewer they present valuable referential data. Exhibition also features reconstruction of Trumbetas’s emigrant room including original furniture, memorabilia, personal objects and clothes he has saved, brought back to Croatia and stored in his home in Velika Mlaka, Zagreb’s a satellite settlement..  

The exhibition is a realization of the author’s longtime wish for the integral presentation and critical valorization of what was up to this moment considered to be merely research materials and didactic documentation.  With intention to maintain the accurate proportion of subjectivity and objectivity, Trumbetas has accomplished to map the gastarbeiter life itself, the social significance of the gasterbeiter phenomena, but also the humorous atmosphere that describes the 1968 - 1985 Germany as seen through the eyes of the immigrant workers. This self-taught author from the Zagreb’s periphery is thus aligned with the most veritable contemporary multimedia artists. The current art practice with its obligatory references to the social surrounding, appropriation of the mass–media material, exploitation of the personal history, writing a diary, organization and interpretation of the data base, etc., in the Trumbetas’s 40 years old collages can find its justified spiritual forerunner.   

VLADIMIR GUDAC

MACLURIZATION

 PM GALLERY

 25.02. 2010 . – 25.03.2010

Opening of the exhebition  25. February  at  8.00 pm

MACLURISATION

Maclura pomifera is the scientific name of a plant growing to 5-6 metres tall. Its branches are covered in thorn-like bumps; its leaves are dark green, compact and heart – shaped. In late summer, round bumpy green fruit grows on these branches, which then ripens till late autumn, reaching the size of 1 to 25 cm in diameter. When the fruit is separated from the petiole, a white sticky juice is secreted. Originally brought from Canada, the purpose of the plant was rather practical. It was namely supposed to grow into a hedge. However, it was soon forsaken and left to grow its fruit which was neither harmful nor beneficent to humans.

By the end of the war year, 1993, I accidentally came across a larger amount of fruit which had fallen off a tree and was scattered on the ground. Fascinated by its shape, mystery and many associations it awoke (such as meteor or even human brain); the maclura fruit has ever since been my constant companion; a parallel universe; an everlasting matter that is always present among other things. It has enabled me to define my own course in timespace.

During 1994, I have begun my work on a set called Maclura pomifera festiva. This has set the basis for future projects, including photographs, videos, installations, texts, plaster casts, reliefs, maclurotypia photographs, graphics and souvenirs. This stage of the project has also enabled me to study the Macluro-fashion within the framework of placing future trends. This was a logical sequence of the festival which has made maclura globally known. The event was in the light of placing the trend at the domestic and international (especially Italian) market. The slogan used was worded as follows: “everyone will get his/her 15 minutes of fame in the future”. The next stage that followed was a rather extreme one and it was called Macluromania. This stage awoke the awareness that the artist, possessing his/her symbol and theme enters a state of mania, transforming into phobia and finally ending in paranoia. The, back in 1997 used slogan represented a form of a salvation from madness: “In the near future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes”.

Layouts for the new cycle appeared during the final, public, maclura-based work presentation in 1998, which was placed in the design section. Working title of the new stage was Maclurocilli, which is the name of the universal medicine. The medicine is still in the laboratory-experimental stage, and even though some interesting results have been achieved, it still has not been clinically tested. Since this is a stage requiring more time to develop, because this is a universal medicine we are talking about, this segment is not ready for public presentation yet.

In the meantime, a set of fortunate events has enabled maclura to be included in current world globalisation trends. Thus, a new branch of Maclurosophy has been established, which has been given the name of Maclurisation. The significant thesis about the end of history, set up by Francis Fukojama, is being demystified in this field, where various places of the world are coming together. If world affairs were not that tragic, the thesis would even be funny. But it is not.

The history of the world is just about to begin.

Vladimir Gudac

SVEBOR VIDMAR
No title

Karas Gallery
Praška 4, Zagreb
HDLU

Opening, Friday, 05.03.2010. at 7pm 

05.03. - 28.03. 2010.

DUALISM HAS THE BLESSING OF THE ARTIST

Somewhere half way between Ireland and Arabia lies Zagreb, where Svebor Vidmar lives.  Painter, illustrator, curator, visual culture teacher, partaker of this time meagre in the things of the spirit. The geographical triad mentioned is a swirl of visual reasons,  mantras, contents, absences.  In principle there is no need to deal with traces, though the trace itself may coerce this.

We recall the sentence of Charles Baudelaire (from Rockets) which goes: “The arabesque is among all drawings the most refined.”  It is easy to deal with this statement looking at Svebor’s drawings. Ornament, arabesque, one artist, another artist, a third artist.  Similarities and kinships suggest the expression of a common truth, condition, time and message. But we shall continue along the path of the original cultivation of abstraction started by Svebor Vidmar.  By the way, comparative sight is full of pragmatic truths and claims.  Here we inevitably notice our western spirit, involved in the materialisation of the world of art. True enough, there is a spiritual programme at work in all.  Ireland has its codices, manuscripts with miniatures and monumental crosses that juxtapose the miniature to the sky.

Arabia, that is, Islamic culture, is completely shot through with abstraction, which functions as decorative and/or spiritual visual reading matter. A world of abstinence distant from us, but: the reigning multitudinousness of the West also includes such impulses and productions, even more so, as tradition proves. For example: a labyrinth signifies the allegory of human fate, from the Greeks to Mannerism. Often the focus has slipped away into the Spirit. The author’s drawings too do not retain the view upon the self, but have powerfully teleported him into the spiritual. This brings us closer to the essential, what has to be said when it’s about abstract drawing.  Figuration is de-concentration, we would say, without having made a value judgement. However, the spiritual condition is at work as soon as we move away forms related to the human world. A mental vibration seems not to have the contours of form, nor the situatedness of recognisable life. Although Vidmar derives from culture, figuration on the whole, he resorts to the message of abstraction, the arabesque.  It is a bold breakthrough since, put simply, our public has figural expectations.  With the appearance of a work of this kind comes the need to have it radically explained…

There, an article writer likes things to have a meaning. Without doubt, a fairly strong will has made this artistic selection.

Crossing over the frame is a symptom.  The overall effort of the artist is first of all located in confidence. The tautology of all the pieces at the exhibition suggests to us a certain culmination of gestures, intentions, ideas, wishes.  The title Untitled hits the spot. A break with figuration, but visible and put on display.  This is a chance made use of successfully to express the self, irrespective of the universal dualities.  An eloquent emptiness, a reckoning with focus, with hierarchy, which is common. Perhaps a bold waste of time. Apart from the visual topic of the arabesque being a story, still, the unflagging stories known to all are wanting.  For the occasional observer of Svebor’s drawings, this must be a plaintive story, the raptures of forms being missing.  But I highlight the choice, perhaps the compact behind this ascetic practice (asceticism on a human scale?).  We can look at Svebor’s drawings as we look into glass, or as we look at ourselves in the mirror, or as if we were looking at Malevich’s speaking whiteness.  All views are good/fruitful, the author is by our side, also by our side is our own feeling of a saucer-eyed being, a suite then around the moderate emptiness of lines, lines and lines.

Somewhere it has been said and written that drawing is a stronger and safer sign of the spirit than language (as sign system). To that extent, on this artistic occasion we can conclude that drawing represents the soul or the spiritual dimensions that the Logos only fulfils about, let’s say, 5% of the time. (Of course, numbers gladden, but more or less share the fate of language.)

The absence of figuration receives all figures, it is eloquent, the conceptuality of remaining at the frequencies that are the potencies of all forms.  Enough invisibility has been applied to be the warp of human placement into matter. Svebor’s drawings are documents of equilibrium. Since everything comes out of the spirit, the drawings that we see at the exhibition are a part, a representant of the primary, which has in its refined and minimalist and ascetic way touched on the secondary world of organised forms.  Other fine, visual circumstances of the actual pieces/drawings (the identical dimensions of the pieces, the similarity, the wanting titles, the symbolism of number, the symbolism in general, the transition to another visual aspect, the unframing of the frame) complement the mannerist charge in the spirit of the not so long ago neo-avant-gardes.

Vlado Martek

BIOGRAPHY

Svebor Vidmar was born on December 15, 1973, in Zagreb. He graduated at the Applied Art School in Zagreb in 1992, painting department, class of Duško Malešević.  In 1997 he received a scholarship to the Kulturzentrum BINZ 39, Scuol Switzerland.  In 1999 he took his degree in painting, education major, from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, class of Miroslav Šutej. In the same year, he received Zagrebačka Banka Prize for the best dissertation piece.  In 2000 he was accepted as a member of HDLU.  Since 2006 he has worked as manager of the Vladimir Filakovac Gallery in Zagreb. In 2008 he became a member of ULUPUH, section for applied painting, caricature, illustration, comic strip and cartoon film.  In his spare time he is into writing children’s stories. 

IZVOR PENDE

Die Ferne Gottes

04.03.-28.03.2010.

Opening 04.03.2010., Thursday at 7 pm

Barrel Gallery
HDLU, Trg žrtava fašizma b.b. 

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Galerie Koch and thanks to support of Republic Croatia - Ministry of Culture, City of Zagreb and Face Croatia.

Per aspera ad astra

On Izvor Pende’s Work

Photography—Izvor Pende’s work emanates from photography. The artist does not use it as a sui generis artistic medium. He is not concerned with photography as an artistic image. Rather, it serves to capture impressions of reality which at the moment of their discovery strike Pende as worthy of being painted and which he aspires to translate into art. For him, photography replaces the sketchbook of the Old Masters. In a short circuit with reality, such sketches depicted the later work in its original form. Hence, the Renaissance theorist Federico Zuccaro compared the drawing with the divine act of Creation. He saw in it the first emergence of the idea for a work. In this respect, photography in the work by Pende can by all means be related to the traditional role the drawing played for painting. Only that the hand carries out modifications to the appearance of reality during the act of drawing. This occurs in accordance with the painter’s designo interiore, with the mental image of his later work, which is not possible in photography, in which the artist’s mental images initially remain in the conjunctive. They are purely optative. Izvor Pende is therefore also in no way concerned with copying his photography, as did the so-called photorealist painters. They were delighted when their paintings were taken for genuine photographs, because they utterly confused the viewer’s eyes. In contrast, Pende uses his photographic depictions of reality to assemble a fictitious world before he even picks up a brush. He pieces together collages out of different images, for instance a ship docked in the port of Hamburg with the coast of Dalmatia, and something entirely new emanates from this alliance during the act of painting. In the work entitled Coast (2009), the ship becomes a boat-shaped rock spur, and even the sea and the sky are composed of impressions from different photographs.

Painting—Izvor Pende reduces, omits, supplements, and condenses. He concentrates and essentializes in his painting. This makes the comparison of photography with painting blatantly clear. Yet this also means that for the artist, the law of mimesis, the most realistic representation possible of the real world, no longer applies—which also cannot be the case otherwise for a contemporary painter. If there is something like a normative standard for Pende, then, taking recourse to Paul Klee, it is: “Do not reproduce the visible, but make it visible.” Such a norm begins to become the guiding principle of painters when photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. Because it more accurately depicts reality than painting; it empowers painting with an entirely new freedom. The era of the grapes painted by Zeuxis, onto which, it is said, birds hungrily descended from the sky, and Apelles’ drapery is finally over. Modernity dawns, and the painter is now concerned with advancing to the heart of the grapes, tearing apart the drapes, and allowing the images behind visible reality to take shape. The mirror as a metaphor for painting is obsolete. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the contemporary painter is called on to go behind the looking glass and impart to us what he sees there. Izvor Pende’s series testify to his step behind the mirror. When he treats themes such as women or the sea in invariably new paintings, he belies the myth of both the singular as well as the ultimate picture. In Pende’s painting, the variation of what is always the same is a subtle allegory not only of the relativity of the gaze and what is seen. It also reveals that reality no longer allows itself to be accommodated in painted universals. There is not only one valid image of the world. Pende’s style of painting, in which he applies several layers of glazing, thin paint one upon the other, furnishes the formal equivalent of it. His manner of painting, as brisk as it is, has the power required to respond to an altered perception of the world and reality in an adequately supple way. Its characteristic fluid style demonstrates an enlightened presence of mind in which both the fleeting and ephemeral qualities of all phenomena are preserved.

Series—In Pende’s paintings, meticulous precision is frequently pitted against the formal briskness of his style when he develops his subjects. In this connection, one need only look at the summer house in the work of the same name from 2009—the structure of the wood and the façade glisten in various, strictly isolated shades of color. This house has also traveled a long way in order to ultimately arrive on the coast of Dalmatia in the artist’s painting. Pende became familiar with it while viewing a quarantine camp, took photographs of it, and relocated it into the melancholy, shadow- and sun-drenched summer serenity of his painting. In general, the dialectics we see here in terms of form and content account for a substantial share of the appeal of the artist’s pictures, in which he not only links different moods but different styles of painting. Whereas he subtly alters the perspective on his theme from painting to painting. The consistent variation and differentiation of one subject in different works require the emancipation of the viewer. Instead of blissful immersion, artistic work in series forces the viewer to compare the individual pictures and thus scrutinize them. Izvor Pende’s strategy is reminiscent of the famous gesture by Bertolt Brecht, who in the 1920s had a banner hung in the theater bearing the words “Don’t gape so romantically!” Brecht did not want the audience to identify emotionally with what was happening on the stage; he wanted them to penetrate it intellectually. Members of the audience were supposed to better understand themselves after the play had ended. The tua res agitur that emerges behind this, the claim that art is to be treated as a person’s concern and thus the concern of each individual viewer, is an age-old aesthetic demand. It also applies to Pende’s paintings. It lifts them out of the purely private and biographical and makes them universally binding. Pende’s pictures address us in an existential way. Their series character resembles a test arrangement. Viewing them takes one on an inward journey, making each viewer his or her own Columbus. Only instead of discovering America, we discover ourselves.

Portrait Sea—In his most recent series, Izvor repeatedly portraits a young woman and the sea. Either each subject on its own—the woman is often depicted in the interior of a house, and the sea as part of a coastal landscape—or both of them together, whereby the young woman, immersed in her view of the sea, is usually portrayed from behind. The titles of the pictures reveal that the protagonist’s name is Bubu, and that Dance is the section of the coast near Dubrovnik, the town in which Pende, who was born in Zagreb, spent the major part of his youth and where he also experienced the Balkan War. However, for all intents and purposes, these names have all but no bearing on how one views the paintings. Because Pende is less interested in the singular or the individual, and more interested in the general and the essential. His sea is not the Adriatic, even when, such as in the Lokrum series, he focuses on a specific island off the coast. Rather, the artist is eager to depict the sea’s inherent qualities as they might appear anywhere in the world we encounter the ocean. He paints it calm and waveless, domesticated by the tides like a well-behaved pet, or roaring and spuming, attacking the coast like a wild beast. The colors in which he immerses the sea, the sky, and the coast in his paintings even deny the original source of the subject. We never see coloring even remotely reminiscent of the sun-drenched Dalmatian coast. The paintings are not cheerful. They have been bathed in dismal, dark shades of blue or gray that turn them into melancholy mandalas. They are more suggestive of the North or the Baltic Sea than the Adriatic. Once again, Pende does not create his pictures out of mimesis. Reality does not serve as a mirror for his art, but rather he looks, as described above, beyond the looking glass and thus behind reality. He fictionalizes his impressions and turns them into collages. In this way, he creates a kind of essence of what he has seen and experienced in a painting. When we look at his painting, we do not lay our eyes on the world, but on the world as it has been filtered through the artist’s temperament and temperature. “L’art, c’est le monde vu par un tempérament,” as Emile Zola, the great novelist, once wrote to his friend Paul Cézanne.

Portrait Women—Thus, art gives us the world as seen through the lens of the artist’s temperament. World (“monde”) and temperament (“tempérament”), representation and modification, are the leverage that also define the depictions of women in Izvor Pende’s work. For all the high recognition value of the protagonist, her portrait is less interested in the individual than in the essential. This urge to transcend the personal portrait and achieve one that is universally valid testifies to the artist’s Platonic longing to advance to the heart of human beings and things through his paintings. The numerous portraits of the young woman named Bubu exhibit superindividual facets in much the same way as the depiction of the sea in Pende’s work. We see her slender, beautiful shape and her delicate face with loose black hair and dark, pensive eyes in various situations. The artist frequently portrays her in interiors, standing at the window and looking out, or sitting or lying on a bed in a bedroom. She wears scanty black panties and an equally as revealing undershirt. On the one hand, the way she is depicted directs the viewer’s gaze to the field of erotic reception. On the other hand, any lasciviousness is decidedly repelled due to the melancholy mood that lies over the paintings. The dominating and determining shades of blue connect the portraits with Pende’s views of the sea. The protagonist is fully immersed in herself. Her gaze never seeks out the eye of the viewer. And she is always alone in these pictures. Her appearance is less a thematization of the joys of an erotic encounter and more one of the human being’s fundamental loneliness. We are all born alone, and we will die alone. Any pain we have to endure is ours alone. An embrace, regardless of how warm, is always only temporary consolation. It is precisely this human conditio fundamantalis that is the main theme of the paintings. They turn these portraits into monuments to human forsakenness. Despite her personal contours, Bubu is transformed by the painter’s hand. For Pende, the character becomes the allegory in which the viewer finds him- or herself.

Melancholy—Taking comparative recourse to art history, in Izvor Pende’s series we notice a remarkable reversal. We need only call to mind Botticelli’s radiant beauties—Primavera, The Birth of Venus, or Pallas and the Centaur, in which mythical figures achieve such pronounced individual features that Botticelli’s contemporaries believed to recognize specific women from Florentine society. And if we look at them today, then it is hardly different. For all the ideality of their portrayal, in the first instance we believe we see the personal portraits of unmistakable women. Whereas Botticelli’s painting consummates a transformation of the universal into the individual, as we have seen, the contrary is the case for Pende. However, what they have in common is the theme of melancholy. Because Botticelli’s women, with their exaggeratedly slender limbs, have faces surrounded by ample golden hair that generally exhibit an introverted, solemn, melancholy expression. The Greek physician Hippocrates was the first to investigate the character of melancholy. For him it is one of four possible temperaments that define the nature of human beings. In his view, our temperament is dependent on the relation in which yellow and black bile, phlegm, and blood blend together in our body. If they combine in a harmonious way, we have a balanced temperament. If one of the juices dominates, this is reflected in a person’s disposition. Hippocrates traces the occurrence of melancholy to an excess of black bile in our body. It has an impact on the soul. The melancholic has a sad outlook on the world and reality. In our day and age, the American essayist Susan Sontag sees the cause of melancholy in an inherited burden on intellectuals. For her they are people born under the sign of Saturn. Their business is thinking, and that makes them sad, because it repeatedly points out their mortality. Marcel Duchamp made us aware of the fact that humans normally suppress this in his epitaph, whose ironic malice can hardly be exceeded: “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent” (Besides, it’s always others who die).

Figure from behind—The depiction of melancholy has always appealed to writers and artists. That thinking and sadness exist alongside one another is iconographically featured in the pose of the head heavily resting in the hand of, for example, Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, or the angel in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. The figure with its back turned toward us in paintings by the Romanticists, for example in works by Gustav Carus or Caspar David Friedrich, represents another form of pensive contemplation. Its view of the world takes place on our behalf. When, along with them, we look at Creation, the painters want us to see it with their eyes as a mirror of the soul. In awe over the majesty of a moonlit night, as in a painting by Carus in which the painter appears to be moved by Immanuel Kant’s insight that above him is “the starry night” and in him “the moral law.” Or moved by the sublime nature of a mighty mountain range such as the one depicted in Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Or unsettled by the infinite vastness and expanse of the sea as it is featured in his Monk by the Sea, which, upon viewing, Heinrich von Kleist once felt as if his “eyelids had been cut away.” Yet even if the latter painting involves dismay over the possibility of a world that has succumbed to disorder, the predominant feeling in the Romantic perspective of reality is the certainty of being in safe hands in a pantheistically interlaced Creation. When we look out at the sea with the figures Pende portrays from behind, with his women, this certainty is gone. The title of the series God’s Distance alludes to this in a way that cannot be ignored. But distance does not mean non-existence, but more a deus absconditus, a hidden God. Perhaps, in spite of everything, he can ultimately be discovered behind the impression of the senselessness of existence; behind the ocean’s endlessly rolling waves and the emotional and existential vicissitudes of life. In his play Caligula, while Albert Camus may describe the absurdity of the human condition with the words “men die and they are not happy,” Izvor Pende’s paintings in principle know better. Light time and again steals into them. A sophisticated dramaturgy illuminates—faintly, but pensively—the blue views of the sea and the blue room in which—along with us—his women contemplate themselves and life. Per aspera ad astra.

Michael Stoeber

Translated from the German by Rebecca van Dyck

IZVOR PENDE

1976                                    born in Zagreb, Croatia

1996-98                        Art Academy in Zagreb, Croatia

1998-2005                        Art Academy for Painting (Kunstakademie), Düsseldorf,

Germany with Prof. Rissa

2005                                     Akademiebrief der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dubrovnik

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2003                                    

Galerie Acht P!, Bonn; Germany *

2005                                    

Galerie Acht P!, Bonn, Germany *                                   

Galerie Christa Burger, Munich, Germany

2007

Galerie Koch, Hannover *

2008                                   

BAT, Campus Galerie, Bayreuth *

2009

Kunstverein Bad Kreuznach, 1.-21. March 2009

Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Trier e.V., 24. April – 24.May 2009
Kunstverein Uelzen, 7. November – 6. Dezember 2009

2010

HDLU, Zagreb *

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005            

Galerie Koch, Hannover, Perspektiven -  Junge Malerei aus Düsseldorf und Frankfurt, Isabel

 Kirschner & Izvor Pende; Cristina Herradas Martín & Amalia Theodorakopoulos *

Ikop-Mueeum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Eupen, Belgien, ikop-Art-Prize 2005 *

2009                                   

BAT, Campus Galerie, 10th Anniversary Exhibition, Bayreuth

AWARDS

2002                         Prize of the Art Academy, Düsseldorf, Germany

2005                        Nominee for the ikop-Art-Prize

COLLECTION

Gabriela Henkel, Düsseldorf

TRANSFORMATIONS OF REALITY

Snježana Ban, Natalija Škalić, Josipa Štefanec, Ivan Tudek, Ivana Vulić

9.2.- 28.2. 2010.

Opening, 9.2. at 8pm

Karas Gallery
Praška 4, Zagreb

Embassy of Japan, Japan Foundation

and

Croatian Association of Artists

Ring Gallery  invite you to exhibition opening  

PAINTING FOR JOY;

NEW JAPANESE PAINTING IN 1990s

Opening :  28.January 2010. 19 h

Exhibition is open unti 21. February 2010

Makotoa Aida

Yoshitaka Echizenya

Miran Fukuda

Takanobu Kobayashi

Naofumi Maruyama

Takashi Murakami

Yoshitomo Nara

Nobuhiko Nukata

Taro Chiezo

The artist featured in this exhibition were born between the late 1950s and the early 1960s so that they are more or less in their thirties. Other then the fact that they all paint figurative images, neither the pictoral subject nor the style of painting have much in common. They grew up during a period when Japan was achieving a high level of economic growth and fully experienced the process of drastic change Japan underwent. They rediscovred painting , which was regarded a “dead” form after being baptized by Formalism, and set it free from the closed framework of “art”. Their aim is to make painting an “open ” site for communication on an individual basis.

Miki Okabe

(Extract from the exhebition catalogue: „ Introduction – Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in 1990s“

Introduction

––Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in 1990s

Miki Okabe (Exhibition Division, The Japan Foundation)

      The artist is condemned to please. By no means may he create an object of aversion in a painting. A scarecrow is for frightening the birds and keeping them away from the fields whereas paintings, even the most terrifying, are there to attract visitors.

–––Georges Bataille, ‘Art, Exercise of Cruelty’ in 1949

To describe the rapid change in the Japanese society of the 1990s in short, it should probably be said that the principle of autonomy, which modernism aspired to in all fields, has began to sway from its very root.

  For example, the spread of personal computers has not only revolutionized the method of communication but created a new human relationship through the use of the PC. What with the spread of a massive amount of information and the presentation of virtual reality, the sense of reality which each person should have possessed individually has been lost. Typical examples of this phenomenon would be the strange unreality of the war scenes broadcast all over the world during the Gulf War or the way the people grasped the “comic-like” reality of the eschatological idea of Armageddon advocated by Aum-Shinrikyo.

  The computer has also influenced the way music and art are received. For example, the latest music can be listened to directly on the Internet without having to go and buy a CD. Likewise, artworks can also be enjoyed in the virtual space provided on the Internet without having to go to a museum. Such experiences reach beyond the question of the reproduction of artworks and have altered the way of our sensibility.

  The drastic changes in the environment surrounding art described above have influenced the way of art, the existence of artists, and even the role of the museums.

  Firstly, the museum’s role as a place where art exists has changed. Due to the vogue to build local museums run by the prefecture or city, which began in the 1980s, the total number of museums and, subsequently, the number of exhibitions have increased, spurring the trend to offer “art” as a form of leisure. The museum no longer retains its solemn image as a “sanctuary of art” and is required to be opened to the society and play a role of some sort. As Adorno said, it is as if the museum has been incorporated as one element of a gigantic cultural industry.

  While it would be easy to reject the current situation of art and art museums as commercialistic, the fact that, for better or worse, that is what is required by the society at the moment cannot be ignored.

  There has also been a remarkable increase of media to convey visual images not only by means of photographs and cinema but in the domain of subculture such as television, videos, games, and cartoons. Art is influenced by such images and vice versa. As objects for consumption, they create one fashion after another and disappear.

  It is interesting that, at a time like this, “painting”, which is a traditional and rather conservative genre of art, has begun to be spotlighted again from the mid-1990s.

  The artists featured in this exhibition were born between the late 1950s and the early 1960s so that they are more or less in their thirties. Other than the fact that they all paint figurative images, neither the pictorial subject nor the style of painting have much in common. They grew up during a period when Japan was achieving a high level of economic growth and fully experienced the process of drastic change Japan underwent. They rediscovered painting, which was regarded a “dead” form after being baptized by Formalism, and set it free from the closed framework of “art”. Their aim is to make painting an “open” site for communication on an individual basis.

I. From Simulationism to New Pop

Ever since the 1970s, Japanese painting has long been under the strong influence of Formalism and Conceptualism. Even when New Painting with expressionistic features such as intense brushwork and bright colouring swept over other countries, the situation in Japan remained basically unaltered. In the 1980s, installations became the mainstream in art and painting was regarded a “dead” form of art. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, a method known as Simulation began to be employed in photography as it benefited the characteristics of that medium. This gradually spread to the domain of painting. By quoting art historical masterpieces, which we accept unconditionally as art, and existing images, it was an attempt to clarify the artistic and social conditions which define them. Miran Fukuda and Takashi Murakami were active from those days and were considered representative figures of this trend.

  The characteristic of Fukuda’s paintings is her everlasting curiosity and quest regarding the act of “seeing” and the background system that enables us to “see”. She focuses on classic European portraits and attaches real lace instead of the elaborate lace portrayed in the picture or composes a painting from the viewpoint of the figures depicted in Velazquez’s Las Meninas. There is also a work in which she has stuck a Lipton tea bag on a renowned painting in the history of Western art such as Rembrandt’s Danae Visited by Zeus in the Form of a Shower of Gold. By incorporating a real fragment into the painting, the artist is trying to create a new relationship between the viewer and the painting. She also provides amusing tricks in her paintings such as Grated Radish and Kewpie Mayonnaise, in which the commonplace reality is enlarged in the painting and turned into an object so that it appears even more abstract than an abstract painting.

  Takashi Murakami states that it was from 1994 onwards that he seriously undertook painting. His starting point was a distrust in the modern painting which formed the mainstream in the academism of the time. Having specialized in nihonga at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, in his The King’s Seat of Two Dimensional Perspective Series, he chose a renowned picture scroll of medieval Japan entitled The Legends of Mt.Shigi as his subject and depicted the mysterious pot, which suddenly appears in a rich man’s house and empties the treasury while everyone else is making a fuss, as the leitmotif. One of the characteristics of Murakami’s works is this wondrous sense of coexistence of both Japanese and contemporary motifs. In Murakami’s case, his activities are not limited to painting. He works in a remarkably broad range of fields including performances such as Shinjuku Youth Art (in which Miran Fukuda also took part), traditional Japanese-style painting, and dolls. One of his motifs, DOB, is almost as almost familiar as a cartoon character and Murakami has acquired a “registered trademark” for it and is even producing character goods.

  Murakami’s method of work is quite unique. He has founded his own workshop, Hiropon Factory, which is like a medieval painting workshop or a group studio producing animated cartoons, and deligates the production to assistants belonging there. Although Murakami himself does the sketch and gives detailed instructions about the production, and, admitting that the Japanese-style “flat” image he aims to achieve requires skillful technique and time, such method of production has probably been chosen as an antithesis of modernism.

  Not only Murakami but Fukuda also makes use of nihonga formats in some of her works. However, Makoto Aida’s approach to nihonga differs from these two artists. Aida acknowledges himself as a skillful painter and is astonishingly faithful to the techniques and materials established by his predecessors. Be it Japanese-style, Western-style, or even an amateur painting like those painted by schoolchildren in art class, once he has selected a format, Aida fits himself perfectly into it. To him, what is important is “what to paint” and the estrangement existing between the subject and the format while swimming around in various formats that can be selected as desired.

  In his War Painting (senso-ga) Returns series, he makes screens out of “battle pieces”, which were executed during World War 2 and have purposely been ignored. He has also done Valley of Bush Warblers, in which so-called “pink” fliers used to advertise the sex industry are substituted for the pink of the cherry blossoms. There is always an ill-minded dissociation between the format and the content in Aida’s paintings.

  Nihonga, which is a format intended for the portrayal of the beauties of nature and picturesque landscapes, and “art lessons”, which are required in the school curriculum, are formats which Aida chose in order to draw the viewer’s attention towards the systems that everyone accepts without any criticism. Yukiko Okada’s Pavement is a series of 16 works depicting the pavement onto which a leading talent, Yukiko Okada, jumped down and committed suicide in 1986. It is done in an Impressionistic manner alluding to Monet’s haystacks and water lilies, which change in appearance as time passes by. There is a gap between a certain sense of respect that Aida seems to have for technique and style and the subjects he chooses, which appear to be irrelevant to the style of his paintings. Perhaps that gap represents his feeling of ambivalence towards painting.

  Taro Chiezo studied cinematics at New York University and his paintings and installations reflect a highly cinematic temperament and his interest in the media.

  Taro has referred to his interest in artificial life on several occasions and has devised new creatures such as a bananalamb and a calf-engine, which are mixtures of machines and animals, as if to imply the future in which an artificial life will be composed of machinery. In Robots Fall in Love / or Not, torsos without a head, arms, or legs, are crawling around in vain giving an “uncanny” impression in spite of their “cuteness”. By purposely incorporating kitsch images such as idols, dolls dressed in frills, and characters that appear in comics, Taro is criticizing the unfailing desire for consumption in the modern society. Imaginary Mountains portrays part of a robot, which seems to be a cartoon character, and a familiar view of mountains in an intentionally coarse touch. By juxtaposing two totally irrelevant elements, even what we are accustomed to are turned into “uncanny” objects.

  It is hard to clarify the charm of Yoshitomo Nara’s œuvre. The reason is that his paintings are straightforward and amiable at a glance and yet, these seems to be something beyond that. It is always the weak, children or stray cats and dogs, that he depicts. Moreover, they are clearly injured, holding a knife as if to suggest that something evil has taken place, or portrayed with a rope to hang themselves. The background is no more than a spread of monotonous colour that hardly provides any explanation of the circumstances so that you could make up any kind of story using your imagination. The friendly and simple images he paints are like cartoon characters but they are actually portrayals of the pain lying at the basis of human existence, which requires us to live on despite knowing of the innocent bygone moment captured in the picture. Yet, the children Nara depicts do not simply represent the weak. Although they appear weak, they cast an upward glance towards us as if they have some trick or other in mind. Besides innocence, Nara also implies the cruelty that can be caused by such innocence.

  The charm of Nara’s works lies in the emotions his works are capable of scooping up and the potential of opening up different layers of communication depending on who the viewer is.

II.Painterly Factors

Compared to the Simulationist and Neo Pop artists, although their ideas differ in direction, Takanobu Kobayashi and Naofumi Maruyama are both artists that deal with problems that exist inside painting.

  Maruyama started out doing abstract paintings in which proliferating images were depicted without reference to the motif. The wavering images blotted onto the cotton canvas with stencils remind us of the microcosm we find by looking at a laboratory dish through a microscope. Maruyama was winning esteem already in the late 1980s as a legitimate successor of modernism. However, his expression gradually changed from abstraction to figuration. In Leek and Open Date, he depicts figurative images of objects that actually exist in his everyday life. In a series of his friends’ faces, the contour and the features are all that we can recognize in the vacant image that surfaces on the canvas. The nonexistence of the details paradoxically leads to the existence of photography.

  Takanobu Kobayashi chooses motifs that are personally significant in his daily life such as a dog, pillow, goldfish, hand holding chopsticks, or microwave oven. If the environment surrounding his lifestyle changes, the subject he depicts changes accordingly. Surrounded in maldistributed and unroutine light within the image Kobayashi depicts, these everyday and commonplace motifs are radiant with a sense that they are existing as objects.

  Although the submarine Kobayashi painted early on as a self-portrait was highly symbolic, by 1995, in Beehive, he depicted bees dancing boisterously in the light together with a beehive and established a style of his own. Most of the subjects Kobayashi paints are perfectly commonplace images. Perhaps he adheres to the everydayness as a sign of distrust of meta-concepts or simulacra such as “religion” and “philosophy”.

III.Towards a Utopia

With the exception of Fukuda and Murakami, most of the artists featured in this exhibition established their own styles in the 1990s. In Nobuhiko Nukata’s case, prior to 1995, he was producing abstract paintings in line with modernism. It so happens that Nukata, Nara, and Kobayashi were all studying at Aichi Prefectural University of Art around the same period. From circa 1995, Nukata gradually began to discover a style of his own. The works he presented in 1995 demonstrate signs of his style in which Junglegym-like geometric forms are painted freehandedly against a monotonous background. As the titles suggest, the original motif in his works was the Junglegym, which he then converted at will to achieve his current style. At first sight, his works bear a close resemblance to Op Art. Nevertheless, his interest is to be focused more on the decorativeness of painting in a broad sense of the meaning including free play of the lines and the relationship between figure and ground. Although this kind of play is a factor that has been eliminated by Minimalists and the Formalists, in Nukata’s case, complemented by a harmony of subtle colour tone, it is effective in inviting the viewer into the work.

  Paintings by Yoshitaka Echizenya also exhibit a sense of play. Having passed through Simulationism, his sense of pictorial play is focused in a direction that differs completely from Nukata. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, Echizenya was paining in a quasi-classical style quoting medieval European religious paintings, classical Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings and Ainu patterns originating in his hometown, Hokkaido. He rearranged what he quoted from paintings of all ages and countries and wiped out the meanings that had inevitably accumulated in each painting to create a unique pattern composed of figure and ground.

  Afunpar [The Ainu word for the gate of other world] (1993) was painted during the period of transition and is highly comprehensive in that all kinds of elements are mixed to create a visionary world or utopia as indicated by the title. After he created this work, his motifs became all the more simple and repetitive. His colours also changed from a bright and glamorous palette to a key tone of blue, dull green, or brown as if to connect the sky and sea surrounding an island. The post-modernistic excess is restored to the question of the decorativeness required for a painting to exist.

IV. The Joy of Painting

How can a painting attract the viewer’s attention? As demonstrated by the artists presented in this exhibition, there are many different ways to do so. However, they all share a common aim in that they are endeavoring to establish the fertility that painting possesses as a form. The object of “attracting the viewer’s attention” could be a characteristic signifying the potential of a new synthetic experience in which the restriction and discrimination supplied in a museum or particular space are overcome and even the framework of “art” is transcended. This is possible because painting is “open” to everything and that is indeed where the joy of painting exists.

                                     (translated by Kikuko Ogawa)

VIDEO BARIK

Opening December 10.2009 , 7 pm

PM / Extended Media Gallery

Barrel Gallery, Ring Gallery

10.12. – 13. 12. 2009

Video Barik, a programme of recent video art, although part of the programme of the PM / Extended Media Gallery, was anticipated for the exhibition venues of the Barrel Gallery and the Ring Gallery. It was devised by members of the Council and the curator of the PM Gallery, the objective being to have three days of screening of video works by artists of the younger generation who are not properly and certainly not institutionally represented. The works are screened in a loop without any particular structure, since presentation in free form enables the artists to show their new works irrespective of the financial obstacles of the programme, and lets the public have an insight into recent art production. This manner of presentation is at the same time an attempt to map the current constellation of relations on the local scene and an evasion of the imperatives to discover the new, for the sake of catalysing events on the scene. At the same time, the traps of a thematic determination of the programme were sidestepped, since the artists and their works were directly nominated by members of the PM Gallery Council.

Also to be presented in the framework of the programme is a new work of Kata Mijatovic, in order to avoid the notorious phrase “exhibition of artists of the younger generation”. Kata Mijatovic is a counter-balance and at the same time a fact of generational synergy, thus creating something new on the art scene.

In line with its tradition, with Video Barik, the PM Gallery confirms itself as a platform for the experimentation and presentation of current artistic events and new productions on the domestic scene, the mission being to keep up with the progressive currents and advocate original art projects, particularly those of artists of the younger generation.

Participating artists:

Antonia Begušić (Dubrovnik, 1984)

„Ovo / This”

Duration: 2 min 6 sec

Tonči Gaćina (Split, 1983. )
“Korijeni / Roots”

Duration: 3′ 44”, 2008

Luka Hrgović ( Zagreb, 1986)
“Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam”
2008, HD, 1 min

Ivana Jurić (Osijek, 1982)

” JA / I”

3min 35sec, 2008.

Tihana Mandušić (Split, 1982)

“Being a Woman…”,

12 min and 45 sec, 2009

Martin Mrzljak (Zagreb, 1987 )
“social networking”

shot on subsequently digitalised 16mm film

2 min. 00 sec, 2008

Nives Sertić (Dubrovnik, 1984.)
“IAN AND I”
55’ 28’’, 2007

Kata Mijatović (Branjina, 1956. )

Vrištanje / Shrieking, 2009

seven-channel video installation