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22/1/2004

Maja Vukoje / Prisma

Galerie Martin Janda, Wien

Galerie Martin Janda presents the work of the Austrian painter Maja Vukoje from January 23 to March 6, 2004.

In the mid-90s Maja Vukoje's career was launched with her large-format, caricature-like oil paintings. In exaggerated colors, the paintings depict the artist - her physiognomy disfigured and contorted - in dream worlds and places of longing. In her next series, Vukoje created representations of puppets' heads and bodies, intensely confronting the topic of man's inner and outer fragility.

Maja Vukoje's most recent series marks - not just in content, but also in technique - an important step. The themes seem prosaic at first: people on horseback, children in the woods or a woman in front of a curtain. The vague - almost ghostly - impression is brought about by her painting technique: a dynamised landscape painted thinly, the line quality varying from masterly to expertly lax. Elements of import for the narrative (images and figures) are sprayed on in contrasting colours, in glaring to toxic hues. These elements are employed sparingly, alternating between lucid and "dirty" painting. The representation of psychic and physical states, which Vukoje already thematised in her puppet series, was especially important for her artistic development and has shifted in these new works to "in-between realms": she demonstrates virtuosity in conveying elusive moods. "Inner conflicts, fragmentation and contradictions, which must unavoidably be endured, seem to ooze like acid to the surface and dissolve the innate closed form." (Stella Rollig: Malen, um sich den Schatten zu stellen, in: Maja Vukoje, Exhibition Catalogue Studio d'Arte Cannaviello, Milan 2003).


Prisma

Length of the exhibition: January 23 - March 6, 2004

In the gallery's upper level we are showing the group exhibition "Prisma", curated by Andreas Huber, with works by Carla Ahlander (SWE), Tue Greenfort (DK), Massimo Grimaldi (I), Diego Perrone (I), Kirsten Pieroth (D), Gernot Wieland (A).

As opposed to the notion of art in the expanded field, this exhibition addresses the condensed position in current art production. This can be expressed in traditional art forms such as drawing, sculpture, video or photography; a visual transposition of relevant societal issues, however, predominates. The works are characterised by the artists creating (self-)references to life, and query the separation of art from life, or the playful circumvention thereof.

Diego Perrone, for example, digs each day for several months in his parents' yard; he documents the hole, ultimately 6 meters deep, with a series of photographs("I Pensatori di Buchi"). Kirsten Pieroth shows the video "Untitled (on the occasion of the exhibition's opening night, Kirsten Pieroth drives the wrong way down a one-way street which leads to the site of the exhibition)". The prerequisite and integral component is, as a matter of course, cognizance of the gamut of contextual approaches over the last few years.

Personal views are contrasted by scientific descriptivism; poetic, sometimes lyrical and intuitive approaches predominate. There is a propensity for the nostalgic-subversive touch.

Arvo Pärt's compositions are often described as "prismatic". This refers to a lightness in the sense of luminosity. They're about shattering reality and the different, often minimal shifts, or our particular perception thereof, that qualify a piece as a work of art.

Image: Maja Vukoje, Untitled, 2003. Oil, acrylic, spray on canvas 170 x 130 cm Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda

Galerie Martin Janda
Raum aktueller Kunst
Eschenbachgasse 11 A-1010 Wien
Opening hours: Tues-Fri 1 p.m.-6 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.-3 p.m.

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