Jelena Bulajić: Untitled (after)

With Untitled (after), Kunsthalle Münster will present the first solo exhibition by Jelena Bulajić in a German institution, providing an overview of the work of the artist. Bulajić’s works possess an intrinsic logic of showing and revealing, arising from an intensive engagement with the artistic and the visual, their inherent conditions, scope and potential. Her art is characterised by a painterly reflection based on a parity between and equivalence of seeing and cognition. The interplay between figuration and abstraction demonstrates a concept of how images are made and, in addition, demands a thorough examination of perception. Her works are thus a speculation upon the very dimensions of reality.

For the representational paintings she presents in Untitled (after), Bulajić has appropriated works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, referring to a reality conveyed by the media. The quotations and their transfer to another medium allow the artist to dispense with subjective expression in her choice of motifs, to concentrate on the craftsmanship of her paintings, and to penetrate the levels of meaning beyond what is depicted. The paint, with all its physical qualities, is the “living material” of her works and constitutes their physicality, their “skin”. At the same time, it is the interplay between the original and the copy, or rather Bulajić's version, that makes one think.

When viewing her photorealistic works alongside her abstract paintings White on Black, one is confronted with the question of what media-mediated realism actually means. Each in its own way, Bulajić’s two groups of works are a commitment to the medium of painting and its qualities in the wake of photography. It is not representational realism as such, but instead, this kind of figurative realism is the subject of scrutiny per se. Fascinated by illusion, it is dis-illusion that motivates her in her work. Consequently, the paintings lay bare their essential constructedness. In addition to the obvious interpretation that a reproduction is not identical to the original object, one is forced to reflect on what one understands by the reality of an object in itself. Against this backdrop, the artist's recent shift toward the medium of sculpture in her series After Stone appears to be a logical next step.

At a time when we are constantly overwhelmed by digital photography and confronted by the same old reception of all manner of images on our screens, Bulajić avails herself of the conditions of painting and sculpture as a mode of seeing through this miasma. Thus, an examination of what we call images—as Bulajić does, questioning their narratives and their veracity—would appear to be particularly important with regard to the ubiquitous, inuring tsunami of images we have to deal with on an everyday basis. It is about schooling the senses, which are increasingly at risk of atrophy—we are literally unlearning how to see, how to look. Her game with reality requires concentration, a precise act of looking and a questioning of the images.

Curator: Merle Radtke