Radenko Milak: curated by Leon Krempel

2 - 30 July 2016

Overview

This show will be curated by art historian Leon Krempel, director of the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt, Germany

Opening Saturday, July 2 from 4 – 6pm

Radenko on his current work: ‘A major part of my production is watercolors based on documentary photo, photojournalism, old newspaper, postcards, posters, documentary movie and other propaganda archives. My practice as an artist has always been heavily influenced by the idea that our relationship to the world and its history is largely determined by the uninterrupted and continuous flow of images that documents the world.
In 2013, I completed a project called “365”. “365, Image of Time” is large-scale series of watercolors that create historical panoramas depicting geo-political themes, ideologies and disasters from the 20th century until today. The project consisted to paint each day during one year a black and white watercolor image of an event that occurred the same day, related to modern and contemporary history. The event could be political, tied to conflicts, to the life of ideas and the arts, to scientific or technological progress. The result symbolized the landscape, through the image, of the short but intense history of the 20th century, as I see it, as I understand it. For me, the role of the Image today is crucial, especially in the era of digital revolution, also I am very interested to understand the status of image today as a political fact. To use them and to construct them as new versions of stories. This Relationship has become even more important with the expansion of social networks and new information technologies. I’ve placed at the heart of my activity as a painter the question of what a painting could be at the age of the digital time and continuous accessibility to images. This global corpus of images, impossible to mentally embrace in its entirety, vast as it has become, is one of the fundamental elements of our imagination, be it individual or collective.

Leon Krempel on the current show:

Pictures, pictures everywhere: streams of pictures in our minds and all around us. However, everyone relates to them differently, by assimilating some and avoiding others. In an artistic context, pictures refer not only to something else but also to themselves. Creating a picture which exists autonomously is the main wish of the artist. Not everything is a picture, but everything can be depicted. This is how one imagines the world: as being in a gallery or in a film which does not have an end. Time and space vanish, reality fades. The antidote: pictures like those by Radenko Milak.