LIKE TO LIKE (I)
ARTISTS: VADIM FISHKIN, IRWIN, MAGNUS LARSSON, YURI LEIDERMAN, DAN PERJOVSCHI, ARIEL SCHLESINGER
November 17, 2007 – December 8, 2007
With the two-part group exhibition LIKE TO LIKE, Galerija Gregor Podnar presents selected works by the artists represented by the gallery in its new location in Berlin. The exhibition runs until the end of January 2008.
The works in the first part of the exhibition refer to various geographic and cultural situations. They are linked by an interest in observing the world, whether through analytical classification or poetical interpretation. These are journeys to literary and political cosmoses, as well as encounters with cultural clichés somewhere between humour and poetry.
Vadim Fiškin’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places (2000-2005) stages a dialogue between two light bulbs quoting utopian, literary places from the similarly-named publication by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. Fiškins works alternate between science and personal experience, metaphysics and pragmatism, the artificial and the real.
In his double portraits, Magnus Larsson also creates a dialogical situation. By means of mirroring or in diptychs, he juxtaposes figures, connecting traditional portrait painting with stylistic elements from comics, fashion and other areas of the visual media. Shown in the exhibition are three small-format works, Untitled (Portrait), from 2007.
Ariel Schlesinger’s object animated with tiny illuminated diodes (Untitled, 2004) could be read as a selfportrait, an Ariel washing-powder box relieved of its promotional role. A discrete intervention in an objet trouvé was also carried out on a model aeroplane (Untitled, 2003), whose right wing is lodged in a ping-pong ball.
Yuri Leiderman’s sculpture Church (2007) from the series Geopoetics is a vaulted wooden construction, from which an embroidered cushion is suspended. In a rather grotesque way, it combines elements of sacral architecture with references to staged ethnicity. “The idea is basically to make ethnicity, politics, races and people groups in their essence turn themselves into non-existent objects like ovals, boxes, lumps and cupboards.” – Yuri Leiderman
Two further works – photographs of half empty Jewish urn graves (Untitled, 1994) – are given a marking system made up of different-coloured dots. Cross (1991), Black Square on Red Square (1992) and NSK Panorama (1997) are photographic documents of three actions by the artists’s collective IRWIN, realised in New York, Moscow and Upper Carniola, and gathered together under the title Transcentrala. Three Suprematist symbols (cross, square and circle) were temporally installed in three sites with ideological implications. Following their method of ‘retro-principle’, the group recontextualises and deconstructs various motifs, symbols and signs from the field of art and politics.
Dan Perjovschi’s method consists in the continual sketching of observed situations, whether in the art world or in general political and social life. The sketchbooks form the preparatory work for his larger projects and wall pieces. His sketchbook BEXPERIENCE (2004), which is shown in the exhibition next to the similarlynamed diaporama from 2007, records a journey from Bucharest to Berlin and back again.