MG+MSUM

ARTEMIC #6 | Tanja Špenko, Painting No. 4
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Curator Mojca Štuhec, MA, has decided to present a work by Tanja Špenko.

 

“Included in the permanent collection display in Moderna galerija is also Painting No. 4 (1980) by painter Tanja Špenko. The central part of the painting – which could almost be considered an object – is virtually black, monochromatic, minimalist. Its key element is long strings “growing” horizontally from the frame left and right at regular intervals. They seem like extensions, like ‘feelers’ probing the – still two-dimensional – space of the wall, thus expanding not just the physical, but also the mental, semantic space of the painting. In fact, the work gives the impression of a triptych, with subtle tension arising from the element of asymmetry, due to the strings on the left being longer. While the approach to the material and the ‘expansion’ of the painting give an intimation of the associative and the organic (a direction that the artist’s associative objects will indeed take in the first half of the 1980s), Špenko’s works at this stage are still underpinned by a more deliberate principle. The calm restraint, the reduced and systematic principles of structuring the painting, the repetition of horizontal ‘floating’ stripes or bands of black and gray and strings/lines are clearly a nod to the so-called post-minimalism that emerged in the United States in the mid-1960s. Post-minimalism characteristically intertwined or upgraded certain elements of minimalism (such as repetition, monochrome, modularity, geometric forms, simplicity of forms, etc.) with the more recent approaches of process art and anti-form (e.g. emphasis on the process of production, on sensual, ‘organic’ materials and forms, on introducing content and metaphor, etc.) used to reject minimalism’s lack of reference and detachment. In Tanja Špenko’s works from the early to mid-1980s, as well as in the work of sculptor Duba Sambolec, there is a recognizable artistic sensibility that is very close to the art of German-American artist Eva Hesse from the mid-1960s, described as ‘eccentric abstraction’, after the title of the show staged at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966 and curated by Lucy Lippard. In her abstract paintings, Hesse began using strings and wires jutting out of or hanging from frequently still monochromatic and simple forms, indicating transition into space or sculpture, while at the same time introducing, through the organic materials and the work processes, the ideas of physicality, sensuality, metaphor, also of the absurd reminiscent of surrealism. Thanks to Špenko’s kindness, Moderna galerija acquired two of her works several years ago, both excellent examples of post-minimalist practices in Slovenia.”

 
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