MG+MSUM

ARTEMIC #19 | Metka Krašovec's red phase
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Curator Martina Vovk, PhD, presents a selection of paintings from Metka Krašovec’s so-called red phase. 

 

“Between the late 1960s and late 1970s, Metka Krašovec produced an extensive series of ‘red paintings,’ initially depicting impenetrable and inaccessible architectural exteriors, then moving inside, into interiors with furniture, beds and clothes, until finally slipping into dark and oppressive representations of hospital beds and stirrup chairs. In this time of quarantine, of social isolation and separation from others that engender anxiety and fear about the future and that can turn our everyday and our homes into claustrophobic refuges of anxiety, Krašovec’s red paintings can seem prophetic. Constituting the first sizeable period in her oeuvre, these works indicate the direction Krašovec was to take in her painting henceforth: her paintings are ‘psychic images,’ each of them a hermetically rounded-off image with an existential and psychic charge, transcending – while being paintings of some apparently familiar material reality – mere objecthood by evoking a mysterious, metaphysical presence permeating the visible world. This metaphysical dimension creates a mood of apprehension, instead of being liberating it submerges the known world into gloomy tones of an apocalyptic, claustrophobic dreariness. Lurking behind this apparently familiar world sunken in a red twilight is something unfathomable, alien, unheimlich if not downright threatening – this is a depiction of a sudden insight into the alienness of the familiar world, people and things, relations and order of things, an insight we are apparently experiencing as a global condition for the first time in history due to the current pandemic. This world is devoid of humans, despite the impression that someone had been there a moment ago, their unusual, alien existence deducible from the rumpled bedsheets and clothing, such as a coat laid over the back of a chair. The Hospital Bed diptych from 1976 represents an extreme stage of this closed world without daylight or life, without the person who had just been but is now gone for good.”

 

 
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