Michal Moravcik
Martha Stewart would never dream of…
15.03. – 26.04.2008
Opening
Friday, March 14, 7 - 9 pm
Gallery Antje Wachs is pleased to present Slovakian artist Michal Moravcik (SL, *1974) in his first solo exhibition in Berlin. The exhibition „Martha Stewart would never dream of...“ focuses on research of fetishizing the domesticity and quality of life, regarding some of the aspects how private and public living space is being treated.
The socialistic era of the former Eastern block brought up a new paradox quality into the conception of paneled blocks of flats. The viewer entering the exhibition immerses the post-socialistic environment context. While getting deeper into the gallery rooms and looking at the objects of Moravcik, one feels like moving from the initial framework of the apartment
into urban space with its further relations. The exhibition emphasizes the conception
of interior in a particular way while using single objects of the interior itself.
The artist mirrors an apartment as a do-it-yourself playground, constituted on repeated re-organization processes, where things are often left to their new unexpected fate. It is a room for one who is fascinated by dangerous materials, a place where wicked becomes aesthetic. The object „Noxies, 2007“ reminds of a showcase containing patterns of products similar to those presented by interior-design studios.
However, the actual alluminium bar displays shabby interior elements – the asbestos plates, taken from the artist’s apartment, where they were originally used as an electric isolation placed under lamps or for instance around an electric heater in the bathroom. The work comments the complacency about the living conditions of the past, smoothly merging with those of today.
The research about the aesthetics of obnoxious substances continues in the wallpaper „Homemade asbestos bricks, 2008“. The work is based on a photodocumentation of an average kitchen
in a prefabricated building in Bratislava’s quarter Petr?alka. It documents the DIY aesthetic of the artist’s neighbourhood. A kitchen wallpaper showing an asbestos-bricks motif was hand-sewed by a couple, shortly after they had moved into the apartment some twenty years ago. Five years after they had realized that the material is causes adverse health effects and in order to prevent its possible spreading, they decided to paint it over. Similarly to „Noxies, 2007“, this work shows an evidence of unhealthy material that creates a new aesthetic structure. The object „Na kosť a ešte ďalej, 2008“ explores the temporal condition of the artist’s own living space. It unveils the cultural layers of the fragment of an antique inter-war furniture that is serving now as a plinth for the artists’ mini-cooker.
The site-specific installation „Steps, 2008“ overlaps the imaginary interior with its outer context. In these days stairs are covered with material like concrete that substitutes asbestos, still strongly reminding of it visually. The installation creates a thematic passage to the rear rooms of the gallery.
The inclined stairs‘ surface is inversed, reminding of a non-barrier passing for disabled people.
As the situation of the stairs is turned upside-down, the function of it has changed and movement is limited.
„Dromomania, 2006-8“ concerns the public space of a postsocialistic society. The installation offers to the audience the possibility to move the object forward and thus to read a text written by the artist.
The reading process regulates the speed of the cart itself. The text deals with the notion of
public space in Central Europe and Bratislava. Dromomania refers to P. Virilio‘s dromologic
axiom on accumulation of power, regarding the information networks and movements in urban space. The text describes the potential of post-socialistic societes limited by their confusion.
This is considered to be one of the characteristic features expressed by the title ‚wanderlust’ (Dromomania), in the following term opposed to Virilio’s actual thesis.
Mira Keratová
Project Space:
Ieva Baranauskaite
Paintings
15.03. – 26.04.2008
Opening
Friday, March 14, 7 - 9 pm
Ieva Baranauskaite’s (LT, *1980) nostalgic paintings refer to her childhood. She ran over the pages of her family album and realized, that she is not mostly interested in the details of the memory. What she focuses on is the mood, that is left by that past time. But as she can’t act differently then look at something really carefully, her paintings result in a mixture of an encounter between sharpness and fuzziness, they appeal even more, the longer they are watched by the viewer. Skies seem to become more clear and sharp than the figures in the center. Baranauskaite entices us with her light, brown and ocher colored paintings to drift into a melancholy which one can hardly elude. Then all over sudden she creates another mood with her rich, green grass and a lightning blue sky and evokes the desire that the landscapes of her paintings become alive and the viewer is able to enter them immediately.