East of Eden
Sieben Positionen abstrakter Kunst aus Osijek

Among the members of the younger generation of artists who graduated at the Osijek Academy of Arts and Culture in the last ten years, a group stands out whose creative expression is associated with – disparate and not at all self-evident – the notion of abstraction. In the post-media age of the omnipresence of images, when one of the leading theoretical paradigms raises the question of what images want, these young artists accept the challenges of fundamental definitions of the image, pictoriality and visuality motivated by the legacy left by pioneers of abstraction. The fact that even a little more than a hundred years after the demand for the “suppression of pure feeling” and for the “visibility of the spiritual”, after Kandinsky and Maljevic, young artists today do not diminish their interest in abstraction, and still, it does not reduce a gap in most observers when it comes to a non-mimetic pictorial approach. Despite the fact that we are witnessing everyday life flooded with visuals of abstract provenance (from statistical diagrams, cartographic and astronomical representations, through landmarks in traffic to medical and many other technically generated and media-disseminated images) we still do not find widespread acceptance of art that deals with its formative means or reflects its starting points and meanings – from the social, through the historical-artistic to the ontological. The question of what an image is, and what its possibilities are today, is certainly no longer limited to self-referential questioning of an image from the beginning – and largely during – the last century nor is it accompanied by a radical abandonment of narratives and depictions of the world. The self-reflective evaluation of painting and art, which began in the 1960s with minimalism, pop art or conceptualism, is not over even today, but the need for constant shifting of borders (between media, reality and art, many orientations) is increasingly manifested as a need for their redefinitions. It is in this light that the redefinition of the borderline definitions of painting and pictoriality is seen by the proponents of the exhibition as the reasons for the increased interest in abstraction within the very diverse, vital work of young Osijek artists. With their abstract expressions and conceptual approaches to painting, they consistently manifest a great knowledge of the legacy and unresolved issues of modernity, as well as the slippery terrain of recent inter- and non-media conditions of painting, its position within, and its relationship to a world flooded with images. Image issues in their works are manifested both at the level of the surface and in the spatial dispositions of objects and installations or in the domain of a wide range of technology applications (from posters, photography, video, film, projection, ….). The aim of the exhibition is to point out the specifics of the young Osijek art scene and through differentiated achievements of abstract and conceptual provenance to point out their competence within contemporary discussions in the theory and philosophy of painting in which painting has long been recognized not only as a subject but also as a means of cognition.

(text: Krešimir Purgar, Igor Loinjak)