Marek Meduna, Alexander Wolff

opening on Monday February 7 at 7pm

8. 2. – 12. 3. 2011

Marek Meduna’s (1973) work is typified by his resignation to a lack of complete understanding of the artist’s intention. The artist exploits the independence of a work of art. By repeated insertions of older paintings and objects into installations, he creates space for ‘re-presenting’ them, opening them to further possible interpretations. He examines the nature of an artwork, its capacity to illustrate which, the artist believes, haunts our every step. Both at his own exhibitions and as a curator, Meduna questions the conventional system of presentation for works of art.

In the work of Alexander Wolff (b. 1976) the discourse on painting takes place not only in the domain of painting itself, like in the analysis of its abstract, formal and non-representative vocabulary, but also in many other spheres. Wolff thus works as a co-editor of a journal, he is active as a musician, and takes part in various artistic collaborative projects to explore and speculate on the vagueness of references and the rhetorics of art history or popular culture, and the possibilities of their re-contextualization. As a result, basic questions and the traditional topoi of painting emerge, such as representation and self-referentiality, color and form, decor and functionlessness, as well as issues of subjective expression and social relevancy, or aspects of performativity. While engaged with the continuous process of painting, Wolff makes recourse to theatrical elements such as rhythm, repetition, lack of stability, variability, fragmentation or emptyness. These reveal painting to be a site-specific artistic activity which always occurs only in concrete situations due to gradual convergence of affirmation and self-questioning.

(excerpt from Elisabeth Fritz „Encore une fois: Die Aufführung der Malerei im Werk von Alexander Wolff“)

The exhibition is supported by the Goethe-Institut Prague.