Working as a single entity, TARWUK (Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić, each born 1981) have created an set up comprising a brand new group of sculptures, work and works on paper. The exhibition’s title, which loosely interprets to ‘I planted a bone within the winter backyard,’ is a poetic assertion that displays the artist’s level of departure: the dichotomy of nature in its unbridled state, and the cultivation of an ordered ‘backyard.’ In taking the backyard as a logo of man’s labour and innate wrestle—as object and decoration, enclosure and stage—the gardener, or artist, turns into caretaker of a unconscious terrain.

TARWUK type a part of a technology who got here of age throughout the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties. Although now residing and dealing in New York, the artists’ observe will be understood inside the context of the aspirations, struggles and eventual dissolution of the previous Yugoslavian state, and its elusive inventive avant-garde. Combining disparate visible languages and painterly types to make delicate historic connections, TARWUK deploy quite a few seen and invisible references to create multi-disciplinary micro-worlds, a dynamic web site of collaboration and change.

A brand new group of sculptures discover their place amongst large-scale figurative work, turning into a part of tenebrous, carnivalesque and theatrical mise-en-scènes. Thought-about by the artists’ to be ‘architectural fashions of natural development,’ the place residing is known as a performative act performed out on a cosmic stage, TARWUK assemble a imaginative and prescient that’s kaleidoscopic and illusive. Two of those mise-en-scènes make use of a purple platform—a reference to the notorious artwork intervention of 1968, the place the artist collective Purple Peristyle painted the principle courtroom of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s Palace in Break up, Croatia, blood purple.

A way of escaping the specifics of time continues in TARWUK’s work, which freely reference, amongst different issues, the language of late Nineteenth-century Symbolism, and the expressive modernism of early Twentieth-century artists reminiscent of Edvard Munch and post-Impressionist group, Les Nabis. Of their work, TARWUK depict languid figures inside an abundance of ornamental detailing rendered in a palette of gold, earth tones, blood purple and ethereal grey-silver on darkish, layered panels. Heightening the phantasmagorical high quality of the work, the spectral figures are variously depicted amidst esoteric symbols suggestive of the Byzantine interval; flowers and foliage harking back to the Artwork Nouveau fashion; dreamy passages of floating circles invoking planetary techniques; and delicate, reflective swimming pools of water. A choice of works on paper lend additional perception into the myriad concepts and varieties that form TARWUK’s manifold observe.

Establishing a ‘psychological lineage’ which, ‘ranging from the reminiscence of the Greek statuary, walks it backward to a reminiscence of an undefined pre-consciousness,’ TARWUK’s observe returns to the concept of the backyard as the sector of man’s striving, a potent metaphor eliciting the transformation of fabric and of type itself.

at White Dice Mason’s Yard, London
till March 18, 2023