David Maljkovic
02 Dec 2011 - 05 Feb 2012
David Maljkovic
Retired Form, 2008
all images courtesy artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Georg Kargl, Vienna; Metro Pictures, New York; Sprueth Magers, Berlin, London
Retired Form, 2008
all images courtesy artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Georg Kargl, Vienna; Metro Pictures, New York; Sprueth Magers, Berlin, London
DAVID MALJKOVIC
2 December, 2011 – 5 February, 2012
The collages, films, and architectural mises-en-scène of the Croatian artist David Maljkovic form part of the current critical engagement with modernism. Maljkovic turns his attention to sculptural and architectonic symbols that, against the backdrop of Yugoslav socialism, signified the dawn of a new era: Vojin Bakic's monument to the victims of World War II; the Italian pavilion at the Zagreb trade fairground; the works of EXAT 51, a group of experimental architects and artists who championed abstraction and the synthesis of art and social context in the early 1950s. Maljkovic renegotiates the significance of his native country's historic, cultural, and theoretical heritage by relating it to the present and the possibilities of the future. In his collages, he often combines historic views of powerfully symbolic monuments with contemporary photographs; the settings of his films, by contrast, function as projection screens for a younger generation's ideas about progress, exuding an atmosphere of wasted potential and resigned optimism. Maljkovic's works probe the dialectic between innovations that seem to have been forgotten, the ruinous present state of projects once created amid great euphoria, and the present as an era of transitions and new beginnings.
David Maljkovic, b. Rijeka (HR) 1973, lives and works in Zagreb (HR).
2 December, 2011 – 5 February, 2012
The collages, films, and architectural mises-en-scène of the Croatian artist David Maljkovic form part of the current critical engagement with modernism. Maljkovic turns his attention to sculptural and architectonic symbols that, against the backdrop of Yugoslav socialism, signified the dawn of a new era: Vojin Bakic's monument to the victims of World War II; the Italian pavilion at the Zagreb trade fairground; the works of EXAT 51, a group of experimental architects and artists who championed abstraction and the synthesis of art and social context in the early 1950s. Maljkovic renegotiates the significance of his native country's historic, cultural, and theoretical heritage by relating it to the present and the possibilities of the future. In his collages, he often combines historic views of powerfully symbolic monuments with contemporary photographs; the settings of his films, by contrast, function as projection screens for a younger generation's ideas about progress, exuding an atmosphere of wasted potential and resigned optimism. Maljkovic's works probe the dialectic between innovations that seem to have been forgotten, the ruinous present state of projects once created amid great euphoria, and the present as an era of transitions and new beginnings.
David Maljkovic, b. Rijeka (HR) 1973, lives and works in Zagreb (HR).