KON TRUBKOVICH – SNOW
2014-03-10For this exhibition, the artist has produced three new paintings from his “Mama” series. This project consists of paintings of stills taken from a home video of the artist’s mother at a party on her last night in the USSR before emigrating to America in 1990. Trubkovich further distorts these images before rendering them by hand in oil on canvas. The resultant paintings are ambiguous: highly intimate and humanely collective, they are images of her, and abstracted compositions depicting the portal of a screen; they are evidence of her history, and by extension a description of the artist himself. Unable to fully capture her essence, these works succeed in capturing the essential act of memory; stuck in the static frame, Trubkovich’s subject is recalled from the past, where it will continue to exist imperfectly, both on film and in memory.
A similar effect is achieved by the “Lenny” drawings also on view. Here, the artist has taken a mug shot of the late comedian Lenny Bruce, disrupting and distorting the image beyond facile recognition. Like the “Mama” works, Trubkovich conceives of these as self-portraits of another sort. Indeed, their subject comes about through self-projection rather than perfect rendering; they lie between the anonymous and the personal, oscillating in the space that separates the two. As a tragicomic figure from a bygone era, Bruce’s shadowy presence produces a dull, fleeting sense of loss, as well.
These works’ quiet nostalgia is reflected in the artist’s recent “Snow” series, examples of which are included in this exhibition. Here, Trubkovich has translated footage of the sky into paintings and drawings of varying hues, adding an overlay of mark-making that suggests flakes of snow or the disruptive flecks characteristic of old film; the ineffable spatial atmosphere of these works is akin to the unspoken task of unrequited recollection implied by the “Mama” works.
Opposite – Koltsevaya, 2014
Exhibition runs through to April 26th, 2014
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
NY
10011
New York
