Igor E?kinja - Resources and other short stories Event

The work of the Croatian artist Igor E?kinja navigates between installation, sculpture and photography. In his first solo-exhibition at Galerie Michaela Stock he wants to investigate both the destructive and the constructive nature of sun, light and time, and to look at how destruction can create something new. Without light we are unable to see colours and details, but with too much sunlight details become obscured and features flattened. Time is not a strictly literary category, yet short stories are unthinkable without time. Transmitted across generations, stories cannot help but remind us of how times have changed. In this way his works are charts of time process and transformation.

In ?Resources and other short stories? E?kinja creates multiple layers of interpretation of simple interventions in the gallery space and questions the perception and the presence of the viewer in an environment he constructs. He ?performs? the objects and situations from two-dimensional to three-dimensional appearance and is interested in the essence of the observed, the principle of the observer?s role and his relationship to the observed object.

In the first room of the gallery we locate a large-scale, fragile site-specific installation with glass. The artist creates a space where the viewer finds out an abstraction that does not limit his own freedom of the interpretation, but to him allowed to realize self-finding by consideration provided that he is interested in it. Is the spectator responsible for the vision, or is it the other way around, does the object create it? Due to the reflections of the surface, the viewer finds himself in the middle of the art piece. The Installation is juxtaposed with the Wishing well photo-series (2018). In the fast changing society, wishing well is still a symbol of longing. The series rests that hope is a rhetorical device and a very emotional experience.

In the second gallery space E?kinja presents his series Diagram of accumulation (2017). He captures transformation in the traces left by the sunlight on surfaces of folded Ikea papers. Eskinja experiments with structural units, such as squares, lines, stripes and geometric patterns in various configurations. These folded and open structures become visible by accumulation and presentation in different ways and explore the physical and psychological responses of the eye.

E?kinja`s central idea of using natural sources is to create works that are fragile and have temporal dimension and in doing so, he wants us to rethink their importance in industrial societies. In his narratives, the artist uses the aesthetics of absence to represent the reality of non-communication and loneliness in a post-industrial society.