NEW YORK, NY.- Ana Cristea Gallery presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Jugoslav Mitevski.
The act of creation is inherently tentative. Each decision, each step along the way is taken gingerly, equal parts deliberation and chance, mathematical precision and blind enthusiasm. The impossible balance between many opposing forces and alternating influences serves as the only essential ingredient.
Jugoslav Mitevski’s choice of concrete as a medium literally manifests the transitive operation of documentation that is characteristic of creation. Despite it’s rigidity, concrete is an exceedingly responsive material. With the act of pouring into a preordained mold, creation is no longer merely an action that passes over an object. The action becomes the object. This balance between fluidity and structural definition is inherent from the work’s infancy. In several of the works on display, the hardened concrete slab is brutally beaten, broken in order to create a new form. Subsequent materials become active players: lacquer, ink, pigment and spray paint interact with concrete to determine relief, color and line. The resulting contextual structure documents the relationships between its component parts: their intimacies and their diffidence, and of course, the ever-elusive array of networks into which “they enter a mute dialogue that eludes a distinct narration.”
Perhaps it’s even more appropriate to say that they enter into a dance – a tango that sashayes its way into a salsa – imitating life in practice rather than in form. It’s a dance between mediums, a dance between phenomenon and qualia, and a dance between artist and viewer. As contemporary cognitive scientists and linguists argue, language is instinctual, not learned. It carries the context of experience, knowledge and skill. But it is also an intuitive cognition. Such is the case with Mitevski’s art. The final work (if it can even be called final), the hung work, creates a certain irritation that activates the thinking within the image, beside itself and beyond. It’s an itch that must be itched, and itched again. Results may vary.
Jugoslav Mitevski (b. 1978) currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He was a resident at The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in 2014. He studied fine art at Braunschweig University of Art, Germany, graduating in 2009. In 2013, he received the Kunstfonds Bonn and Kunststiftung NRW, Project Grant, among others. Previous exhibitions include High Wire, (with Natalie Häusler, Thimothée Huguet), Petra Rinck Gallery, 15:21, Polistar, Istanbul, Editions, Koelnischer Kunstverein. Next year, he will exhibit at Artothek, Cologne.
