Search
Along with this portfolio, our clients also searched for the following:
Tijana Stojiljković
Marka Tomić Đurić
Lidija Merenik
Kosta Bogdanović
Đorđe Kadijević
Dragana Garić
Marina Nakićenović
Vlaho Bukovac
Milan Marinković Cile
Ljiljana Drezga
The Hand Was Always A Symbol
The dialogue of two artists presented at this exhibition is based on the realization that they had created two works of art, two hands, independently of each other, in a different historical moment and in a different place but with the ideological basis and result which brought them into the relation of mutual similarity.
With the desire to inspire a dialogue of their works, Šoškić and Trtovac point to many problems facing artistic creativity today. The pluralism of styles and lack of a unified art scene have resulted in the fragmentation, complexation and general discontinuity of artistic thought. Maybe the most important thing in the context of this exhibition, is that acting in an isolated environment which follows only its internal logic and develops only within itself, within the boundaries that have for some time made it provincial, the artist finds himself in a situation in which he is unable to connect his work theoretically and bring it into discourse with previous works. On the other hand, the isolation of the environment in which he works limits the potential impact which the work might have.
The artists provoke an interaction by placing their works in the same (spatial) context, without any vanity which an author might have regarding the existence of a work similar to his own. They share a feeling of the artist not as an author, not as someone who mystifies his artistic expression, but rather the understanding of the artist as someone who expresses universal truths through his art. For Ilija Šoškić and Selman Trtovac art is an existential issue, it is greater than the artist and the work of art. Šoškić says in one text: ''Art ferment is indestructible, regardless of the fact that it kills biologically''. The artistic expression of Selman Trtovac can be identified with a quote which he chose as the title of one of his exhibitions: ''...that seeks extremes in order to determine the middle of the road!''. In seeking extremes, in their unwillingness to compromise and accept the mainstream and conformism in art just as in life, an ''underground'' continuity is discovered in art which can be traced to the appearance of the first avant-garde, and which is not conveyed through influence and continuation of previous achievements, but rather stems from the person, from the artist.
This continuity of artistic thought is manifested in the similarity - similar opinion, or result which is visible regardless of the differences which could be the result of belonging to a certain context - time or place. Avoiding national or religious determinants as something that is not a determinant of artistic creation, Šoškić and Trtovac had in one conversation together declared themselves as artists from the Balkans, and this is the only local determinant which they mention. Along the same line of history and politics, which ''belonging'' to the Balkans implies, there is also the interaction of their works, as both hands were created in seeking the physical, visual expression not just for the Zeitgeist, but also for the genius loci. Their work contains what is local which certainly is not provincial, but necessary to determine belonging. Šoškić left the country a while back in the 1970s and continued his work in Italy, where he came into contact with Pistoletto, Kounellis, Merz, artists who had set the course of the ''second line'' of art, a conceptual trend in Italy which was then developing under the name Arte povera. In the circles in which he moved he also met Luigi Ontani, Gino de Dominicis, as well as other artists of his generation which with their thoughts and works had directed the now already historical trends in modern art. Trtovac, a few decades later, at the famous Academy in Düsseldorf came into contact with Rinke, Kounellis, and mostly with what could be defined as the mental legacy of Joseph Beuys which permeated his schooling at the academy of art there. Šoškić and Trtovac, independently of each other, and at different times (which were not temporally so distant as spiritually) had come into contact with current European trends, reflected and were formed as European artists, still retaining, at least declaratively, their belonging to the Balkans. Declaratively, because their works show this belonging in their concept, at the onset, at the start of the thinking process, but this process ends in raising the particular (history, politics, social structure of a location) to the level of the general.
Placing the locus as the starting point, and the world as the boundary, Trtovac and Šoškić as many others before them have attempted to find a solution to the avant-garde utopia of changing life through art, offering one of the possible models of moving through and out of oneself. The casts of the hand of the artist and the hand of the murderer, as materialization of this paradigm, represent the relationship between man and the world in a relation which implies equating, therefore in a line which identifies man with the world which is his own reflection. Both artists start from one symbol which they interpret in a similar way, and then, by bringing the works in the same spatial-temporal context, they use it to show the endurance and succession of artistic thought. The symbolic hand is that mathematical constant, that unchangeable thing that survives the generational, spatial and temporal gap, obtaining thus the irrefutability of an axiom which both artists ascribe to it.
Ivana Benovic