Maja Vukoje
03 Mar - 23 Apr 2006
MAJA VUKOJE
March 3 – April 23, 2006
Maja Vukoje’s approach to painting is based on a double strategy: with a figurative predisposition, and always using existing media material, she creates pictures of landscape scenarios and mask-like figures. These motifs are overlaid with a sphere of the uncanny and of a physical presence in the process of decomposing, pointing to Vukoje’s interest in a new type of representational painting. A selection of her large-format paintings and her drawings of the last two years will be shown in the Galerie space at the Secession.
Maja Vukoje seduces the viewers of her pictures with scenarios that simultaneously embrace and block out the empathy of kitsch: the deer in the forest, a girl in a ballet dress, and African children appear at first glance as easily accessible motifs, all too familiar from mass culture. But Vukoje disturbs these images by combining them with others in montages, thus breaking down linear structures. Each of her works is usually based on three or four different image sources which she merges to form a narrative of their own.
In her approach to painting, this fragmentation of content is emphasized by loose allusions. The simultaneous use of different techniques—spray paints with acrylics and oil, dripping and smears as well as powerful brushstrokes, earthy watercolor tones next to bile green and luminous orange—generate the necessary tension between the concrete and the abstract. Almost fluorescent colors make the figurative elements start to float, until they move through the pictorial space like shadows of things, always on the verge of dissolving.
Characteristic for Vukoje is the way situations are turned round in the manner of a visual puzzle,
as when a group of flamingos idyllically gathered on the banks of a lake are joined by the shapes of two men with a chainsaw. Such visions, imagined experiences, and déjà-vu episodes are a recurring source of inspiration for Vukoje. Her works are shaped by many-layered content, such as her focus on her own history, a theme most strikingly expressed in her self-portrait drawings.
The drawings revisit motifs, symbols, and ideas from her paintings. In a comic-like situation, Vukoje is embodied as a female hero—a metaphor for her search for universally valid statements. In the same way that recognizable figures are made to appear unfamiliar in the paintings, this figure too stands for shifts in meaning beyond the clichés of good and evil.
The mises-en-scène refer both to the context of film and to that of the theater, which Vukoje continually reinvents for her figures: landscapes recalling forest, steppe, jungle, or swamp reinforce the theatricality of the action with a feeling of fundamental placelessness. Here it is a question of decoding form and figure; correspondingly, Vukoje also refers to her works as “Sisyphus pictures.” A girl in the desert with a shovel and three dried out branches in the background, for example, offers various potential interpretations: How deep can we dig? And what are we looking for?
This opens up many and diverse references, e.g., to Dostoyevsky’s literary works of a psychology of unconscious, soft transitions. Vukoje quotes fantasy (image) content and scenarios of dreamlike sequences, as well as the demand made by such material: “Fantasy therefore always counts on an active recipient, the phantastikos.” (Melanie Ohnemus).
MAJA VUKOJE, born in 1969, lives and works in Vienna.
SOLO SHOWS (selection): 2005 Tresor/Kunstforum BA-CA, Vienna; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; 2003 Studio D’Arte Cannaviello, Milan; 2001 Galerie Chobot, Vienna; Biagiotti Arte Contemporanea, Florence; 2000 Galerie Edition Stalzer, Vienna; The doll is the mirror, Austrian Cultural Institute, Warsaw; 1998 Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; MAJANA, (with ANA), Kunsthalle Exnergasse, WUK, Vienna. GROUP SHOWS (selection): 2005 HangArt-7, Hangar-7, Salzburg; Prague Biennale II, Prague; Silent Stories, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Figur und Wirklichkeit, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; Maja Vukoje: Zeichnungen, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; 2004 Andererseits: Die Phantastik, OÖ. Landesgalerie, Linz.
March 3 – April 23, 2006
Maja Vukoje’s approach to painting is based on a double strategy: with a figurative predisposition, and always using existing media material, she creates pictures of landscape scenarios and mask-like figures. These motifs are overlaid with a sphere of the uncanny and of a physical presence in the process of decomposing, pointing to Vukoje’s interest in a new type of representational painting. A selection of her large-format paintings and her drawings of the last two years will be shown in the Galerie space at the Secession.
Maja Vukoje seduces the viewers of her pictures with scenarios that simultaneously embrace and block out the empathy of kitsch: the deer in the forest, a girl in a ballet dress, and African children appear at first glance as easily accessible motifs, all too familiar from mass culture. But Vukoje disturbs these images by combining them with others in montages, thus breaking down linear structures. Each of her works is usually based on three or four different image sources which she merges to form a narrative of their own.
In her approach to painting, this fragmentation of content is emphasized by loose allusions. The simultaneous use of different techniques—spray paints with acrylics and oil, dripping and smears as well as powerful brushstrokes, earthy watercolor tones next to bile green and luminous orange—generate the necessary tension between the concrete and the abstract. Almost fluorescent colors make the figurative elements start to float, until they move through the pictorial space like shadows of things, always on the verge of dissolving.
Characteristic for Vukoje is the way situations are turned round in the manner of a visual puzzle,
as when a group of flamingos idyllically gathered on the banks of a lake are joined by the shapes of two men with a chainsaw. Such visions, imagined experiences, and déjà-vu episodes are a recurring source of inspiration for Vukoje. Her works are shaped by many-layered content, such as her focus on her own history, a theme most strikingly expressed in her self-portrait drawings.
The drawings revisit motifs, symbols, and ideas from her paintings. In a comic-like situation, Vukoje is embodied as a female hero—a metaphor for her search for universally valid statements. In the same way that recognizable figures are made to appear unfamiliar in the paintings, this figure too stands for shifts in meaning beyond the clichés of good and evil.
The mises-en-scène refer both to the context of film and to that of the theater, which Vukoje continually reinvents for her figures: landscapes recalling forest, steppe, jungle, or swamp reinforce the theatricality of the action with a feeling of fundamental placelessness. Here it is a question of decoding form and figure; correspondingly, Vukoje also refers to her works as “Sisyphus pictures.” A girl in the desert with a shovel and three dried out branches in the background, for example, offers various potential interpretations: How deep can we dig? And what are we looking for?
This opens up many and diverse references, e.g., to Dostoyevsky’s literary works of a psychology of unconscious, soft transitions. Vukoje quotes fantasy (image) content and scenarios of dreamlike sequences, as well as the demand made by such material: “Fantasy therefore always counts on an active recipient, the phantastikos.” (Melanie Ohnemus).
MAJA VUKOJE, born in 1969, lives and works in Vienna.
SOLO SHOWS (selection): 2005 Tresor/Kunstforum BA-CA, Vienna; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; 2003 Studio D’Arte Cannaviello, Milan; 2001 Galerie Chobot, Vienna; Biagiotti Arte Contemporanea, Florence; 2000 Galerie Edition Stalzer, Vienna; The doll is the mirror, Austrian Cultural Institute, Warsaw; 1998 Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; MAJANA, (with ANA), Kunsthalle Exnergasse, WUK, Vienna. GROUP SHOWS (selection): 2005 HangArt-7, Hangar-7, Salzburg; Prague Biennale II, Prague; Silent Stories, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Figur und Wirklichkeit, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; Maja Vukoje: Zeichnungen, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; 2004 Andererseits: Die Phantastik, OÖ. Landesgalerie, Linz.