VIN VIN at Ruyter is pleased to host a discussion between Renée Levi (Basel), Dino Zrnec (Zagreb) and Peter Pakesch (Vienna).

The ongoing exhibition, Renée Levi/Dino Zrnec, inaugurated on 11 September, is articulated through two coexisting solo exhibitions/interventions in the same space which have generated a very productive dialogue between the two artists.

Renée Levi’s gesture is performative, often very quick, and, as the artist herself states, it is the result of a personal condition. Dino Zrnec’s gesture is articulated through a meditative process, often strategic in the way he chooses materials and reaches his final formulations. His crack paintings fluctuate between intention and accident. In this new body of works he compresses painting and shows the viewer what lies behind it, its very first origin, the skeleton.

If Renée Levi states clearly that she is not a painter, mainly because her work is not often articulated through layers, this body of works by Zrnec are anti-painterly par excellence. Exactly in that moment we have an inverted process and the birth of the meaning for the coexistence of the two positions: Levi who usually works in a very installative way, this time presented works which seem more “painterly”; Zrnec, who usually works orthodoxically in the field of painting, this time presented a body of works which seem to be everything but paintings.

With this premise, a couple of questions arise.

Which are the elements that allow the viewer to consider the cleats works as paintings?
Why does Renée Levi define her work as drawing and not painting?
Could we consider Zrnec’s work as pure sculpture?
Which elements allow the viewer to categorize a work as a painting? Is such a categorization still relevant?
What role does process play in these works and can Zrnec’s work be separated from the restricted set of rules and program from which they arise?

These are some of the questions that the discussion aims to investigate with the intention to deepen the knowledge about Renée Levi’s and Dino Zrnec’s practices and visions and to analyze / explore the meaning and possibilities of painting today.