Exhibition opening: 22 May at 20:00, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM)

What is the agency of art? Where is the line dividing artistic agency and the agency of an artist? Where does painting as action belong? While they may seem old, these questions are no less critical today than in earlier times, and relevant both locally and globally. In our current post-referendum depression in Slovenia, we are faced with the realization that the field of art is constantly shrinking, primarily due to the chronic lack of social support which renders us increasingly susceptible to daily political manipulations. On a global level, the genocide in Gaza has conclusively exposed the futility of engaged artistic practices, which have fallen almost entirely silent as the financial support of the First World’s governments and individuals redirected the preoccupations of the (vast majority of) socially engaged artists. Art also seems to have definitively lost its legitimacy in relation to social reality on the declaratory level, and now needs a new foundation as a social agent.

This issue has been central to Marko Zorović’s work in his departure from the artistic mainstream both in his deliberately historical, anachronic artistic idiom of Mannerism, and in his geographical remoteness in the hills of Goričko, idyllically romantic and bohemian as well as existentially profoundly precarious due to its distance from the centers of art and the opportunities they offer. Drawing parallels between Zorović’s life and artistic practice may well be misleading and perhaps even kitschy, but it does support the fundamental argument concerning his artistic practice. In its gesture, it is ironic (with the irony sometimes directed at itself): it is based on a certain detachment, a certain level of travesty with regard to the historical styles the artist plays with, without, however, losing the seriousness, grandiosity and monumentality. Zorović’s canvases could be altarpieces with images of the contorted bodies of saints undergoing spiritual transformation, except that the figures are those of workers. In this way, his art reinterprets the ominous Arbeit macht frei formula, since the irony is directed not only at the religious painting of Mannerism and the Baroque, but also at socialist realism, which, symptomatically, found the first idiom for its glorifying messages precisely in these art styles. This might also explain the recent change of Zorović’s colors from the Mannerist browns to the bluish hues reminiscent of Corot’s or Courbet’s realism. This distance, this inability to translate, and the ambiguity of the message are also evoked by the canvases themselves that have of late become disintegrated: they are pieces, shards of formerly whole compositions, deeply and sharply driven into the whiteness of the gallery wall.

The unwholeness indicated by Zorović’s works could be read in several ways: as the impossibility of employing the heritage of historical struggles to tackle the tasks of the present or – in the spirit of the recent events mentioned above – as the inability of art, and in particular art that declares itself as engaged, to respond to the urgent issues of our time with any relevance. With this reduction in mind, we may well ask what remains. What remains are the questions of whether action is possible after skepticism, and what such action could be based on. At the same time, this is the question of how to think about engagement in art beyond artivism, i.e., an engagement that would be based on and would address and persuade with the artistic means themselves. Because Zorović is entirely serious about the historical styles in his works, despite his irony, finding in them an open form, a gesture, the seed of an affective engagement. The religious rapture of Baroque art here becomes a loud revolutionary cry, introducing something quite rare into the spaces of art – the emotional and intellectual need to “be part of something.” Rather than trying to position this need in clearly defined political narratives, Zorović’s art endeavors to create enthusiasm in the Kantian sense. For Kant, the greatest achievement of the French Revolution was not the revolutionary event itself, but the response it engendered, the enthusiasm aroused in the hearts of the spectators of the Revolution, the enthusiasm that cannot be easily quenched even if the revolutionary event fails. Zorović’s work seems to address this exact community of enthusiastic response: the shards of his heroic images are the germs of enthusiasm that can be reassembled in many ways – and in this common activity we (once again) become a community.

Marko Zorović was born in 1973. After completing secondary school for design and photography, he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO), graduating in 1997 under Professor Gustav Gnamuš. In 2000, he completed a master’s degree under Professor Bojan Gorenc. He received the Student Prešeren Award. In addition to painting, he occasionally engages in restoration work, book illustration, and popular science illustration. Between 2002 and 2005, he published articles and reviews in professional and daily newspapers, as well as exhibition publications. Marko Zorović lives and works in Križevci in the Goričko region.