Aleksandar Duravcevic: Youth

TOTAH presents Youth, an exhibition of new works by Aleksandar Duravcevic, on view from September 5 through October 20, 2019. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The stainless steel plates gathered together in Youth are austere meditations on the limits of control, and the instability of perception. Referencing printmaking, each plate has been indelibly altered by a chemical process involving diamond dust, until a mirrored surface, at once translucent and iridescent, has been produced. As the viewer approaches each piece, the sensory experience of “letting go” becomes more prominent. The works have an almost prismatic quality; from up close they reflect the face of the viewer, from afar they filter light into an oily shimmer.

Echoing the experiments of the surrealists, the organizing principle of the eight works on exhibit derives from the unconscious. As might happen with a discarded mirror found on the street, the possibility of a sculptural object is interrupted by a sudden iridescence—something that emanates from the reflective surface of the stainless steel, but which nevertheless corrodes our purely visual awareness.

Duravcevic’s storytelling branches into draughtsmanship, painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as filmmaking. Youth, however, is perhaps his most conceptual body of work. Coinciding with his sound installation, YOUTH (2002/2019), on display through September at the Temple of Selinunte in Sicily, both exhibitions showcase the negation of the artist’s hand in the face of the natural coloration of the rainbow.

Dwelling on machinic repetition, Youth downplays the presence of artistic intervention. Foregrounding ineluctable chemical processes, each work radiates a compositional wholeness. In this way, Youth could be considered a subtle provocation, a dialectic between art and artifice, the manufactured and the real, resolving finally with the viewer as the focal point of a mirroring portal.

A book with Aleksandar Duravcevic’s photographs of found rainbows taken between 2009 and 2013 will accompany the exhibition.

Aleksandar Duravcevic (born in Podgorica, 1970) studied in Montenegro and Florence, Italy, and holds an MFA from the Pratt Institute, New York. His body of work includes sculptures, drawings, photography, and paintings. Through them he explores identity and duality—across cultures, within history, and between life and death. Duravcevic received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 2005, and his work has been included in exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and MoMA PS1, New York. His work is part of the permanent collections at The Uffizi in Florence, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A native of Montenegro and its representative at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, he was included again as part of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with the exhibition Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostru. Duravcevic lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. For further information please contact info [​at​] davidtotah.com