ZURICH.- New York-based, German-Croatian artist Genoveva Filipovic's newest work runs under the title Shiva 2019 ✆ .

Her art seems enigmatic, but light; it is hermetic, yet open, serious, yet oblique. It is an afterthought and an over-archiver, and never fishes for compliments. It is painting after the proclaimed end of painting that famously was never reached, except perhaps in the heads of art historians and art critics. Nevertheless, the suggestion was a powerful one – perhaps more so for male painters than female painters. The discourse centered on formalism, the idea that form in its essence is free and autonomous, with artworks wide open to interpretation and prone to long accompanying explanatory texts. This idea, pure form as a gateway to freedom, was eventually questioned by postcolonialist and feminist theorists, who pointed out that autonomy comes with a price and no form exists outside of context. This meant trouble for abstraction, the chief discipline of formalism in art. As abstraction was ideologically exposed, the figure, previously cast aside as reactionary, received a cautionary reevaluation and new standing.

Today, as discussions on questions of gender and identity have taken center stage, the discourse of form and figure is largely obsolete (one critical assessment is replaced by another). Feeling that autonomy was impossible, artists have repeatedly chosen to empty their paintings from any content, hoping that this form of radical rejection would ultimately hold some kind of freedom.

All this seems to inform the work of Genoveva Filipovic in some sense - and then again, perhaps not. The question then is: In what context shall her work be read? How shall it be understood, if it refuses to be limited by art historical developments, contemporary gender politics, and established points of view? How shall it be registered, if it evades all calculation and passionately embraces rejection, while refusing that same rejection?

For the time being, all we can promise is the paintings themselves, their contemplation and whatever it is they do or don’t do. One thing is certain: The art of Genoveva Filipovic combines the artist's despair facing the grandeur of ancient ruins with the viewer's despair facing the grandeur of ancient ruins.

Genoveva Filipovic, *1986, lives and works in New York