Suzana Brborović: Saturation Limit

29 January 2014 > 19 February 2014 You are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition: Saturation Limit, by Suzana Brborović, on Wednesday, 29th January 2014 at 8 pm, at Alkatraz Gallery, ACC Metelkova.
The curator of the exhibition is Jadranka Plut.

In her series of recent works entitled Saturation Limit, Suzana Brborović goes on researching the development of her local environment, and consequently, also the space and time. The artist sets architecture in the forefront of her painterly interest.

Once again it is through her own personal experience that she connects her memories and the everyday reflections on the events surrounding her. It is from scaffoldings, trusses and bricks that housing estates of blocks of flats have risen. Contents wise she focuses on the issues concerning living conditions in the contemporary society. In her painterly research she is discovering the ambivalence between construction of residential areas of high-rise flats from the past century, and the recent construction of the so called elitist housing estates that, due to the intentional overpricing, remain uninhabited empty shells left to the ravages of time.

The paintings represent a unique intertwining of urban networks, encircled by various forms of objects, creating a feeling of saturation. With the explosion of shapes Suzana Brborović creates spaces at which the spectator develops a feeling that she/he can enter and exit, and that she/he is part of both, the inner as well as the outer dynamics of the painting. It is this form of distinction between the inner and the outer segment of the painting that creates the spaces that are inter-separated and out of their proper place. The viewer enters into a Saturation Limit, where she/he can detect overlapping, intertwining, and connecting of architectural objects - in this case blocks of flats - creating tension and uneasiness. The paintings open up an extensive area of visual messages, where there is picture field as a closed entity intertwined with a network of images from the everyday life and the imaginary, hence re-defining our relation towards visuality.

The intertwining and conditioning of the painter’s vision of the world with social inequality, on the one hand symbolised by high-rise flats housing estates, on the other hand, however, the trendy architecture intended only for the selected customers, demands a reflection of the situation. Painting is exactly the thing - with its response to these conditions at a different level, by the analysis and disclosure of the strategies and techniques of visuality - capable of creating a field of artistic reflection, interpreting and recycling them by transferring them from a photograph onto a painter’s canvas. We are witnessing a new field of painting, open to the contemporary visual culture, reflecting the contemporary mass media and the position of the painting in them.

Suzana Brborović, is a propulsive and promising painter of a younger generation, who was growing up at the time of economic prosperity of the capitalist world until the moment when she stepped onto the path of her personal independence and, over night – not by her fault, but like many others – found herself in a social and economic crisis. This generation is, consequently, aware of what it means to be an artist today; and she does not remain indifferent towards social issues of the contemporary world.

Jadranka Plut