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Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the UK of New York-based artist, Ivana Basic. For her exhibition Throat wanders down the blade.. Basic features a new body of sculptural work and an accompanying book with original drawings and writings.
In Throat wanders down the blade.. Basic methodically constructs Bridle, the character that embodies the tension of both the fundamental fragility of life as well as the violent force behind its suffocation.
Throughout the exhibition and book, the character of Bridle is constituted on multiple levels. With Basic’s signature alien corporeality at the fore of her wax sculptures, Bridle gains physicality as she inhabits multiple pieces in the show, moving from one form to the other, the glass air vessels suspended on the walls show progression of Bridles breath, and lastly the written work that follows the exhibition, represents Bridle’s voice.
Bridle, is most precisely disseminated in Basic’s central sculpture in the show. The piece spans the width of the exhibition space with entities joisted against opposite walls by a long metal rod that pierces each at its core. In this way both forms are at once wounded yet simultaneously tenderly bonded and joined. It is this same, turgid dichotomy found therein, that also characterizes Bridle’s internal tension as both pieces represent reflections of each other and of her being.
As one wanders through its uncanny interior, forms cushioned with wall padding and glass-blown baubles affixed to the walls like guiding sconces, one senses more and more the character of Bridle and the binary environment from which she is born. If in the written piece we can hear her voice, it is in this exhibition that we not only see glimpses of her ever-shifting and inverting physical form, but also feel her breath upon our face as it is trapped and released again and again from within the crumpled glass vessels on the walls. Her hair wisps past us as we turn to take in another sculpture, and ultimately trace her footsteps through her strange yet all too familiar journey.
Text by
Courtney Malick
Above: Installation view, Ivana Basic Throat wanders down the blade.. at Annka Kultys Gallery, London, 2016. © Ivana Basic. Photo: Damian Griffiths
Trough her work Ivana Basic renders the body as a dense and finite space of confinement and examines the conditions and consequences of that space, its boundaries, its matter, its durability and it’s weight.
Fusing synthetic materials such as silicone and living materials such as wax and oil paint, Basic enfleshes hollow and bruised forms that are at once bodies and habitats. Residing in the liminal space between life and death these sculptural forms test the boundaries of “human minimality” while examining what constitutes the notion of “wholeness”. For the viewer, Basic’s work evokes both the repulsion and the beauty inherent to the pain and fragility of corporeality. Through the duality of her practice Basic negotiates the complex conditions of mortality and speculates on scenarios beyond death and singularity.
Ivana Basic is a Serbian artist based in New York (b.1986). Upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Annka Kultys Gallery, London and Signal Gallery, Brooklyn, as well as group shows at Brand New Gallery, Milan and Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona. Her recent shows include In The Flesh: Part II: Potential Adaptations, Gallery Diet, Miami; Two person show with Antoine Renard, Gillmeier&Rech, Berlin; In The Flesh: Part I: Subliminal Substances , Martos Gallery, LA; Got Tortilla with Butter on Phone. Think it’s the End? , Rod Barton, London; Unsafe At Any Speed , 820 Plaza, Montreal, Canada.
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