ForA - Gallery
presents you a new project
curated by Olga Lystsova:
"Silence of Future Childhood"
by Nikola Markovic
Duration of the exhibition:
18.05. 2022 - 30.05. 2022
Opening hours: Mon – Fri, 14.00 – 20.00
and by appointment:
contact phone: +491748315858
Marburger Strasse, 3. 10789 Berlin
With this introductory excerpt from the text:
'"Silence of Future Childhood'' by Olga Lystsova,
we want to bring you closer to the content
of this exceptional exhibition...
Photo credit; N.Markovic
...Silence of Future Childhood'' at the ForA Gallery consist of two parts - ''Untitled Toys'' and ''Troubled Letters''. The main theme of the exhibition is the theme of childhood in its various incarnations.
Many contemporary art stars like Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons and Ai Weiwei use the theme of childhood. But Nikola Marković approach and interpretation of this theme is completely original.
The exhibition is divided into two separate parts. The first one deals with Toys, where drawings, sculptures and assemblages are shown. Since Dada and surrealism, the toy has become one of the most accessible materials of contemporary art. Nikola Markovic explores the role and importance of toy in the 20 th century in his own unique way. Mystery, drama and magic of childhood fascinates the artist. The use of symbols and metaphor supports the artist in creating his original visual language...
The exhibition is divided into two separate parts. The first one deals with toys, where drawings, sculptures and assemblages are shown. Since Dada and surrealism the toy has become one of the most accessible materials of contemporary art. Nikola Markovic explores the role and importance of toys in the 20-th century in his own unique way. Mystery, drama and magic of childhood fascinates the artist. The use of symbols and metaphor supports the artist in creating his original visual language. “ In the 20-th century a toy takes the importance of a totem”, says Markovic. A series of drawings shows symbiosis between heads of toys and child’s physiognomy, it reflects an inner connection of each child to his toys.
As a special and very important part of this exhibition is the announcement of a large art project titled ‘’The Earliest & Favorite Childhood Toy / Artists, Curators and Collectors’’. This project was created in 2003 and was first documented in collaboration with the curator of the “White Box” Gallery from NYC Juan Puntes in 2014.
Expressive assemblages made of ready-mades - antique metal water vessels with dolls heads and hands/legs impress with their dramatic surrealistic imagery. The second half of the exhibition shows sculptures composed of colored letters in different positions. The sculptures resemble an enigmatic language of calligraphy transformed in dimension. These works are also inspired by the symbols of childhood, reminding free letters drawings made by kids. Pinocchio made of shining metal is one of the highlights of the show. Spectators can see their reflections in the sculpture’s surface as in a mirror. Markovic intends for viewer interaction with his art.
“We recognize our own symbols in these universal codes”, says the artist.
© Olga Lystsova
Saturday, 14 May 2022
With this introductory excerpt from the text:
'LIFE INCARNATE / The Drawing Art of Nikola Markovic'' by Dr Mark Gisbourne,
ForA is pleased to remind you of a unique experience
with universal symbols of childhood
by Nikola Markovic.
Photo credit; N.Markovic
...The artist’s planned ideas for toys developed from his drawings begun in the 1990s, and inspired him to create conceptual, sometimes even highly schematic drawings, images that again served as a resource of immediate evocation.
In the haptic seeing of artistic drawing processes we find compressed or sublimated internal memories (imagined or otherwise) creatively liberated from their condition of self-imprisonment. For Markovic’s concern with early sensate consciousness and development of sensory perception, aims at the revocation and grounding of archetypal childhood memories, the hidden visible and bereft residual traces of the pre-conscious mind. An extended sequence of drawings from 1994-96, referred to under the heading “latest toys of the future”, offered a set of fantastical drawings for monumental and larger scale sculptures. These drawings of neonatal expression were elaborated through a complex array of heads and mask-like facial presentations of childhood memory. The application of deliberate pictorial distortion and of exaggerations of scale of torso-to-head resulted in strange set of creatures born of an inflected imagination. Yet in turn these drawn images evoke an immediate association with anthropomorphic creatures, such as Jabba the Hutt, and various other imaginings often seen in fantasy films. This said, on closer scrutiny, we find that the detailed and expressively hatched drawings constitute a series of schematic biomorph and mechanomorph entities. Hence the link to toys is also made by allusions to prehistory and to the archetype, archaic prototypes. While the psychologism of childhood is of a far more recent date, the unique role of toys has a long multi-millennial history, a continuous shared application and use in constructing childhood play. We might want to speculate on Jungian “collective memory”, but we have no suggestion in the drawings of future toys to intimate libidinal inferences or gendered stereotypes...
© Mark Gisbourne
Tuesday, 25 February 2020
