Old masters

Yona Friedman

9 October - 31 October 2008
P74 Center and Gallery, Ljubljana

Carla Accardi, Geta Bratescu, Yona Friedman, Tomislav Gotovac, Stojan Kerbler, Ivan Kožarić
Curator: Zdenka Badovinac

You are kindly invited to attend the opening of the exhibition on Thursday, 9 October at 8 p.m. at the P74 Center and Gallery, Prušnikova 74, Ljubljana. The event is part of the action entitled "Hosting Moderna galerija!".

Old Masters is not a theme exhibition. The only thing the seven artists presented have in common is the framework of generation: they are all over seventy years old. The show points out just how problematic interpreting the identity of an artist on the basis of the generation he or she belongs to is. It presents seven fascinating, individual aesthetic concepts, and on the meta-level, indicates that the generational conformity suggested by the title may not be there at all.

We are accustomed to titles such as Young British/Slovenian/... Artists, while a title like Elderly British Artists or Senior Slovenian Artists seems unimaginable. Titles with "young" in them promise to satisfy our expectations for what is new and fresh, while the age-related adjectives in the latter instance seem to point to the opposite qualities, as it were.

The title Old Masters of course sounds much more promising than Ageing Artists would; here "old" is understood as accomplishment and virtuosity, as wisdom to be passed on to the next generation. The exhibition Old Masters, however, does not meet these expectations either, since it is too unburdened of academic knowledge; the artists featured here show their playfulness and their distinct views of the world that have not been learned at school. Not only do they not adopt a patronizing attitude to the viewers, they invite them to participate and use their creativity. Some uninformed visitor might well assume these artists are very young.

And yet, the seven old masters must also be looked at through the prism of their generation and its specific experiences. This was a generation that spent its youth under relatively restricting circumstances, e.g. under the socialist regime, or in very patriarchic societies, or in kibbutzim, that is, under conditions in which artists worked quite differently than they do in the milieus that now form part of the developed art system.

These artists' difference is interesting primarily when seen from within the existing art system. Some of them have featured prominently on the international art scene for decades; others have been "discovered" only recently. In view of their age this is a paradox in the working of the art system, but less surprising when we take into consideration the regions that these "newly discovered" artists come from. There is a considerable number of artists from ex-socialist countries who have acquired international renown at an advanced age. The Old Masters exhibition presents well-established artists with the full support of the art system backing them up, as well as those who shone only briefly on the international scene and then sank from view. Their fate depends on when their spaces cross the threshold of the art system.

Will the new spaces of the developed art system belong only to the new generations? The Old Masters exhibition has a young, fresh, new feel, almost generation-less, and yet it speaks of a generation that was only able to go beyond the space of limitations by leaving home.

Gallery P74 is open Tuesday - Friday from 4 to 8 p.m.; closed Saturday, Sunday, Monday

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