urban spaces
Marjetica Potrč & Tobias Putrih
The presentation by the Škuc Gallery relates two corresponding artistic positions showing recent and newly produced works of Marjetica Potrč (in conjunction with the Max Protetch Gallery from New York) and Tobias Putrih.
Marjetica Potrč and Tobias Putrih are both internationally working artists based in Ljubljana (Slovenia) representing two strong standpoints of its relatively small but internationally involved art scene.
Marjetica Potrč (b.1955) is probably the most renowned artist from Slovenia. Educated as an architect she started her international carrier at the beginning of the Nineties. She won both the Hugo Boss Award (Guggenheim Museum, New York) and the Philip Morris Stipendium Grant (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin) in 2000, and she participated at major exhibition events such as Skulpturenprojekte Münstler in 1997 or Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana in 2000 among others.
Tobias Putrih (b.1972) belongs to the younger generation of upcoming artists from Ljubljana. He participated at the SLO Fine Art project, conceived by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset in the framework of Manifesta 3 in Moderna galerija Ljubljana, and he has been invited to the Manifesta 4 taking place in Frankfurt in May 2002.
Although Potrč and Putrih belong to different generations they both deal particularly with urban space, each working on very unique inquiries. At the Liste 02 they exhibit together for the first time.
Marjetica Potrč is interested in the contemporary city as
"a complex and multi-layered spatial and social organism. Her works
reflect the fragmented and contradictory experience of urban space. The
historical centres of cities, with their architectural moments and famous
sights, have in a sense become unreal, they have turned into an image,
a spectacle, they function as a Disneyland" (Igor Zabel). As Francesco
Bonami states "her goal is to connect a variety of sites and local
necessities, to produce comparisons between different parts of the world.
She strives to understand how urban contexts react to their own malfunction,
denying the degradation of their own living conditions."
At Liste 02 we are showing works from her series "Animal Sightings"
(2001, ink-jet prints), first presented at her solo exhibition in Künstlerhaus
Bethanien in Berlin in autumn 2001.
Tobias Putrih has a more poetic approach towards particular
phenomena of urban space. In his project ’Cinema Solution’, Putrih questions
the role of the movie theatre as the consequence of the dark, invisible
room, where the viewer "gets rid of his own body". His basic
idea is to build different, personified cinema theatres: "Constructing
the personified cinema theatres as simple models for objects of pleasure,
high-tech objects, spectacle-producing mechanisms. Their recognition is
in immediate confrontation with my body."
For the Liste 02 we propose to show four cinema theatres models based
on historic, even utopian concepts and related designs: the exploration
of the visual field by Friedrich Kiesler, manifested in 1929 in the construction
of the New York Film Guild Cinema; the visionary work of Herbert Bayer,
who connected the Bauhaus tradition with the ideas which later developed
into corporative thinking in the cultural industry; the design of the
underground cinema, that remained unrealised, by the land-art artist Robert
Smithson; and the vision of the dream cinema journey into time and space
by Chris Marker. Putrih's models of these designs present a unique overview
of more than a hundred-year-old tradition of cinema theatres and are at
the same time personal, intimate responses to globalised and computerised
theatres of the present-day.
Liste 02
The Young Art Fair in Basel
June 11-16, Werkraum Warteck, Basel
www.liste.ch