Goran Trbuljak
dal 27/6/2013 al 26/7/2013
Segnalato da
27/6/2013
Goran Trbuljak
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Ljubljana
Personal and other obstacles. Two photographic works documenting street actions from the early '70s, a series of collages with a poster advertising a group exhibition with one of Trbuljak's early street actions, and a series of black/white, 'white' and full-color monographs.
Galerija Gregor Podnar is pleased to announce Personal and other
Obstacles, Goran Trbuljak’s first solo exhibition at its Project
space in Ljubljana. The show presents a selection of photographic
works, artist’s books, and print-collages, created between 1970 and
2013.
The exhibition is comprised of two photographic works documenting
street actions from the early '70s, a series of collages with a poster
advertising a group exhibition with one of Trbuljak's early street
actions, and a series of black/white, "white" and full-color
monographs. Trbuljak's anonymous street actions show the relation of
an art work inside and outside art institutions such as galleries and
museums, stressing the question of his own position as a young,
unknown artist within the art system as well. His recent "Monographs"
express the wish to represent an artist's career, in this case his
own, by producing hundreds of pocket format monographs made with
various kinds of paper while transforming the monographs themselves
into works of art. The hand-made production of these monographs not
only short-cuts normal, art-historical procedures, by taking the act
of historicizing into one's own hands, but also questions the position
of the artist vis-à-vis his own oeuvre.
As pioneer of conceptual art in the former Yugoslavia, Goran Trbuljak
began his career in Zagreb in the late 1960s with works that critiqued
the institutions of art and questioned the nature of the artwork.
Consequently, his art took particular forms: calling cards left for
gallery staff, opinion polls that demanded a response, and even a
“referendum” of passers-by in Zagreb in 1972 on the question, “Is
Goran Trbuljak an artist or not? 1. Yes 2. No.” In the mid-1970s,
Trbuljak entered into a dialogue with painting: The Sunday Painting
(1974), for instance, is in fact a photographic documentation of one
of the artist’s street actions: on several different Sundays,
Trbuljak went to an art-supply store and painted on the display window
in correlation with the blank canvas and easel behind the glass. And
each Monday, the store’s staff would remove the paint from the window.
The Zagreb-based art critic and curator Branka Stipančić writes of
Trbuljak: “He was the first artist in Croatia to question the meaning
of exhibiting work within the gallery system, and the status of an
artist as part of this, integrating such questions into his art. Every
new step in art was always an ethical issue for Trbuljak. His
influence on the generation of post-conceptual artists in the mid
1970s was decisive.”
Goran Trbuljak’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennial in 1995,
as well as, amongst others, in the following exhibitions: "Kurze
Karrieren", at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna (2004); "...Und so
hat Konzept noch nie Pferd bedeutet", at the Generali Foundation in
Vienna (2006); "Making of Art", at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am
Main (2009), "The Death of the Audience", at the Secession, Vienna;
and "The Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in
Eastern Europe", at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris (2010).
The project is supported by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of
Slovenia, Cultural Department of the City of Ljubljana.
Special thanks to Moderna galerija Ljubljana.
Opening: Friday, June 28 at 7 PM
Galerija Gregor Podnar | Project Space Ljubljana
Kolodvorska 6 Ljubljana
Opening hours during exhibition time/ Tue – Fri / 12 p.m. – 6 p.m. and by appointment
Admission free