This present was chosen as a part of Berlin Oomph powered by Hallen 05—a curated roundup of the most effective modern artwork exhibitions and occasions held by galleries, museums, and establishments on the town throughout Hallen 05, September 2024.

The exhibition “JOHN S. BOSKOVICH I respect my uniqueness” retrospectively presents the work of the LA-based post-conceptual artist John Boskovich, who handed away in 2006, for the primary time in Europe.

Over his twenty-year profession, Boskovich critically engaged with common and visible tradition, faith, psychology, romance, and client habits by means of the appropriation of pictures and ritual objects. Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Boskovich emerged as probably the most distinguished and provocative artists partaking with the legacy of conceptual artwork in Los Angeles. Along with different artists of his technology—comparable to Mike Kelley, Larry Johnson, Richard Hawkins, and Kathe Burkhart—he questioned mainstream tradition and societal norms. Boskovich’s work, which was self-reflective and autobiographical, drew on his life as a homosexual man and radically blurred the boundaries between artwork and life.

Boskovich’s early work was characterised by an ironic and sharp mixture of textual content and picture, considered from a queer perspective in opposition to the backdrop of the AIDS disaster. Within the Nineteen Nineties, his sculptures and installations deeply explored self-help tradition and faith. Within the late Nineteen Nineties, Boskovich remodeled his Nineteen Twenties Los Angeles house into what he referred to as the “Boskostudio,” which served as each his residence and a complete whole murals till his demise. The Boskostudio actually took over your complete house, incorporating partitions, flooring, and ceilings. Every room was theatrically remodeled into a particular staging stuffed with eerie references to consumerism. Boskovich himself described the Boskostudio as “a [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder set the place no movie was ever shot,” however the place “drama thrives in abundance.” Boskovich’s cinematic work was additionally outstanding and forward of its time—his extraordinary movie North (2001), that includes artist and author Gary Indiana studying from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel of the identical identify, is a charming portrait of its topic. 

The exhibition “JOHN S. BOSKOVICH I respect my uniqueness” reveals Boskovich’s work from the late 80s to the early 2000s and attracts consideration to the various useful elements of his work and stylish political severeness which, it appears, couldn’t be extra topical.

at Scherben, Berlin
till October 20, 2024