Bogoslav Kalas
dal 30/6/2011 al 2/9/2011
Segnalato da
30/6/2011
Bogoslav Kalas
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin
The exhibition brings together a wide selection of Kalas's earlier and more recent works, created between 1971 and 2010, all relating to the genres of the nude and the landscapes.
Galerija Gregor Podnar is pleased to announce the opening of Nudes and
Lanscapes, a solo exhibition by Bogoslav Kalaš.
The exhibition brings together a wide selection of Kalaš’s earlier
and more recent works, created between 1971 and 2010, all relating to
the genres of the nude and the landscapes.
Since the late 1960s, Bogoslav Kalaš has focused on classic subjects,
which art history traditionally categorizes by genre, e.g. the still
life, the landscape, and the nude or, more generally, the portrait.
His work is notable for the remarkably unique way it continues and
develops the tradition of figural painting within the field of graphic
art.
This painting-like quality can be seen even in Kalaš’s early
silkscreen prints, which transform the underlying photographic female
portrait into pictures of schematic black and white hatching.
In 1971–1972, working with the technician Vojislav Pavlovič, Kalaš
invented a painting machine that was able to transcribe the visual
information of a photograph onto canvas. Using this digital method,
which Kalaš calls aerography, he is able to control and modify the
resultant emerging image with each new application of paint to a much
degree than is possible in silkscreen printing. This transfer of
information can take weeks or even months to create an individual
work, since the aerography technique has only a single final product.
In the early seventies, Kalaš substantially expanded the notions of
painting and art, as well as the concept of the print. This was a time
when, in connection with the greater attention given to Walter
Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” more questions were being raised about the status of
photography in contemporary art.
“Thus, the machine, which—Kalaš insists—is in essence a tool no
different from a regular brush, paradoxically makes us more aware of
the artist’s agency. In a truly Duchampian twist, the apparatus
exerts a huge amount of energy, electric and otherwise, to point at a
classical nude and say, “This too is contemporary art.” And, as if
to push the irony further, Kalaš himself muses that “possibly the
only conceptual element [in his work] is the choice of classical
genres.” – Ksenya Gurshtein, 2009
Bogoslav Kalaš (b. 1942) lives and works in the town of Radomlje near
Ljubljana. Since 1982, he has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Ljubljana, where he served as dean from 1998 to 2005. He has had solo
exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana (1968, 1975,
1996), the City Art Museum in Ljubljana (1995), the Art Salon in Celje
(1998), and the Cultural Heritage Institute in Ljubljana (2006).
The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of
Slovenia.
Opening Friday 1 July 2011, from 6 to 9 PM
Galerija Gregor Podnar
Lindenstrasse 35 - Berlin
Opening hours Tue – Sat 11 am – 6 pm
free admission