It Wasn't There Yesterday
16 Feb - 06 Apr 2013
IT WASN'T THERE YESTERDAY
Michał Diament, Sławomir Elsner, Igor Krenz, Navid Nuur
16 February - 6 April 2013
"Composing an orderly 'cosmos' out of the chaos of reality becomes, for the individual, an impossible task or one that leads straight to insanity". Thus wrote Jan Błoński about Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz's final novel. The sentence "It wasn't there yesterday" was borrowed from the novel to serve as the title of the exhibition - an exhibition that takes on a similar challenge, stretched, nonetheless, across the shoulders of four independent artists. Gombrowicz's protagonists are set in summer resort in the Zakopane region of Poland, attempting to crack a code of seemingly abstract signs - stains and cracks in the ceiling, a twig hanging on a string. This exhibition, set in a gallery space located in central Warsaw, is an examination of the contemporary potential of abstraction - both in life and in art.
Through a range of examples across a variety of genres, we observe the tension that is created between objects and materials that are familiar to us from our everyday lives and the language of abstraction. Abstraction, once associated with a break with narrative structures and representation, can also be treated as a reflection of a higher order that governs our human activities. The cosmos of abstraction and the cosmos of the everyday come together in specific places and times, often arranged or documented by the artists.
The works presented in the show It Wasn't There Yesterday hover between a documentary record and a fantastic creation, united by the urge to release form from its utilitarian associations. This is retrospection, introspection and projection all at once, a mixture of moments in time, narrations and artistic traditions - experimental film, decorative art, post-conceptual actions, abstract paintings - which pursue fulfillment in the unreal, a creative perspective on the physics presiding over everyday life.
Michał Diament (1935-1977) was a photographer and designer of custom-made art glass from Wrocław. This particular artistic discipline developed significantly in the 1960s and '70s under the auspices of state-run art academies and exhibition networks. After receiving his diploma from the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Diament began working at the institution's Interdisciplinary Photography Workshop. Alongside his independent experiments in photography, he also contributed to what is now a documentary archive of the current art scene, recording, for example, the conceptual symposium Wrocław '70. Above all he documented the development of art glass design. Several dozen of Diament's photographs of objects in glass, which also included several of his own designs, were brought together to create the album Szkło wrocławskie (Wrocław Glass), published in 1970. He shifted to color photographs by the end of his career and was published in the top trade magazines of the time - Fotografia (Photography) and Projekt (Design).
Working at the junction between two disciplines, Diament creates a phenomenal universe of para-functional forms. Some of his glass objects were created especially for the purposes of photography. Through his careful arrangements and lighting, these abstract, decorative forms were translated into the language of modern photography, gaining a new, surreal graphic quality. Documentary photography became, on the other hand, an autonomous aesthetic activity that emphasized the formally refined craft of art glass design. Diament's works, both in the realm of fine art glass and photography, are evidence of a particular historical moment for the modernist culture of art - which endowed the language of art and design with a particular aesthetic that was distinct from the pragmatics of everyday life.
All photographs by Michał Diament presented in the exhibition are his original prints from the 1960s and '70s.
The monumental wall composition by Sławomir Elsner, a Berlin-based illustrator and painter born in Poland in 1976, was created especially for Raster gallery for the show It Wasn't There Yesterday. Elsner's inspiration for this new series of large-format works was an earlier series of his own paintings. In the flakes of paint and crumbling plaster falling from the canvas the artist discovered elements of classic fairy tales and scenes from contemporary history. The point of reference for the work was Piet Mondrian's Still Life with Ginger Pot II (1912). This early example of an abstract study, in Elsner's rendition, gives the impression of a momentary, incidental vision. Through it he examines the basic emotions that accompany visual perception and the impulse to "read" abstraction and subject it to re-figuration.
Navid Nuur (ur. 1976) is an Iranian artist today based in The Hague. His works take the form of objects, installations, films and actions inspired by the activities, materials and things of everyday life. The work shown at Raster gallery is straightforward, yet it reveals an unexpected potential through a visualization of the gallery's metabolic processes. Pizza boxes collected after gallery employee lunches have been pasted together to serve as a screen for projecting slides depicting the gallery's trash. In Nuur's piece the routine of everyday work in a private art institution becomes a microcosmos of abstract forms and the interactions between them.
http://www.navidnuur.nl/
Igor Krenz (born 1959) is an artist known for short, brilliant films that stretch the limits of convention in the field of video art. His latest work Rerun sets itself apart from his earlier works - a 20-minute-long étude produced using advanced digital technology which references the poetics of 20th-century experimental films. The looped sequences of dynamic, abstract images create a hallucinatory whole, accompanied by a specially-composed score by Robert Piotrowicz. What distinguishes Krenz's work from the avant-garde experiments of structural film is not only its post-modern context, but above all the subversive simplicity of this aesthetically elaborate work of art. In creating the film, the artist used basic props taken from the kitchen pantry: pasta, flour, fleece placemats, rubber bands and scotch tape. The concept behind this nostalgic journey is not merely a fascination with the formal radicalism of the original avant-garde, but also the way it is fetishized in today's art world.
Michał Diament, Sławomir Elsner, Igor Krenz, Navid Nuur
16 February - 6 April 2013
"Composing an orderly 'cosmos' out of the chaos of reality becomes, for the individual, an impossible task or one that leads straight to insanity". Thus wrote Jan Błoński about Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz's final novel. The sentence "It wasn't there yesterday" was borrowed from the novel to serve as the title of the exhibition - an exhibition that takes on a similar challenge, stretched, nonetheless, across the shoulders of four independent artists. Gombrowicz's protagonists are set in summer resort in the Zakopane region of Poland, attempting to crack a code of seemingly abstract signs - stains and cracks in the ceiling, a twig hanging on a string. This exhibition, set in a gallery space located in central Warsaw, is an examination of the contemporary potential of abstraction - both in life and in art.
Through a range of examples across a variety of genres, we observe the tension that is created between objects and materials that are familiar to us from our everyday lives and the language of abstraction. Abstraction, once associated with a break with narrative structures and representation, can also be treated as a reflection of a higher order that governs our human activities. The cosmos of abstraction and the cosmos of the everyday come together in specific places and times, often arranged or documented by the artists.
The works presented in the show It Wasn't There Yesterday hover between a documentary record and a fantastic creation, united by the urge to release form from its utilitarian associations. This is retrospection, introspection and projection all at once, a mixture of moments in time, narrations and artistic traditions - experimental film, decorative art, post-conceptual actions, abstract paintings - which pursue fulfillment in the unreal, a creative perspective on the physics presiding over everyday life.
Michał Diament (1935-1977) was a photographer and designer of custom-made art glass from Wrocław. This particular artistic discipline developed significantly in the 1960s and '70s under the auspices of state-run art academies and exhibition networks. After receiving his diploma from the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Diament began working at the institution's Interdisciplinary Photography Workshop. Alongside his independent experiments in photography, he also contributed to what is now a documentary archive of the current art scene, recording, for example, the conceptual symposium Wrocław '70. Above all he documented the development of art glass design. Several dozen of Diament's photographs of objects in glass, which also included several of his own designs, were brought together to create the album Szkło wrocławskie (Wrocław Glass), published in 1970. He shifted to color photographs by the end of his career and was published in the top trade magazines of the time - Fotografia (Photography) and Projekt (Design).
Working at the junction between two disciplines, Diament creates a phenomenal universe of para-functional forms. Some of his glass objects were created especially for the purposes of photography. Through his careful arrangements and lighting, these abstract, decorative forms were translated into the language of modern photography, gaining a new, surreal graphic quality. Documentary photography became, on the other hand, an autonomous aesthetic activity that emphasized the formally refined craft of art glass design. Diament's works, both in the realm of fine art glass and photography, are evidence of a particular historical moment for the modernist culture of art - which endowed the language of art and design with a particular aesthetic that was distinct from the pragmatics of everyday life.
All photographs by Michał Diament presented in the exhibition are his original prints from the 1960s and '70s.
The monumental wall composition by Sławomir Elsner, a Berlin-based illustrator and painter born in Poland in 1976, was created especially for Raster gallery for the show It Wasn't There Yesterday. Elsner's inspiration for this new series of large-format works was an earlier series of his own paintings. In the flakes of paint and crumbling plaster falling from the canvas the artist discovered elements of classic fairy tales and scenes from contemporary history. The point of reference for the work was Piet Mondrian's Still Life with Ginger Pot II (1912). This early example of an abstract study, in Elsner's rendition, gives the impression of a momentary, incidental vision. Through it he examines the basic emotions that accompany visual perception and the impulse to "read" abstraction and subject it to re-figuration.
Navid Nuur (ur. 1976) is an Iranian artist today based in The Hague. His works take the form of objects, installations, films and actions inspired by the activities, materials and things of everyday life. The work shown at Raster gallery is straightforward, yet it reveals an unexpected potential through a visualization of the gallery's metabolic processes. Pizza boxes collected after gallery employee lunches have been pasted together to serve as a screen for projecting slides depicting the gallery's trash. In Nuur's piece the routine of everyday work in a private art institution becomes a microcosmos of abstract forms and the interactions between them.
http://www.navidnuur.nl/
Igor Krenz (born 1959) is an artist known for short, brilliant films that stretch the limits of convention in the field of video art. His latest work Rerun sets itself apart from his earlier works - a 20-minute-long étude produced using advanced digital technology which references the poetics of 20th-century experimental films. The looped sequences of dynamic, abstract images create a hallucinatory whole, accompanied by a specially-composed score by Robert Piotrowicz. What distinguishes Krenz's work from the avant-garde experiments of structural film is not only its post-modern context, but above all the subversive simplicity of this aesthetically elaborate work of art. In creating the film, the artist used basic props taken from the kitchen pantry: pasta, flour, fleece placemats, rubber bands and scotch tape. The concept behind this nostalgic journey is not merely a fascination with the formal radicalism of the original avant-garde, but also the way it is fetishized in today's art world.