I Made This
I Made This
Solo exhibition, Božidar Jakac Art Museum, former monastery church, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia
24 September 2021-27 March 2022
The exhibition I Made This consists of spatial works created by Tomaž Furlan, sculptor and multimedia artist, who often addresses the complex relationships between humans, our environment and the everyday banalities. His latest work consists of a series of objects, with which he directly, materially and self-reflectively addresses the social dynamics between the so-called civilised society and its most common accessories. A series of sculptures, installations and spatial interventions created from robust materials, such as stone, terazzo concrete, marble and wood are on display in the Former Monastery Church.
Tomaž Furlan’s artistic practice is deeply interwoven with a humorous and ironic attitude to situations that an individual might face in his everyday life and that he is, in the spirit of the times, forced to solve in the manner of optimal efficiency. In 2005 he started constructing a series of absurd machines that share the name Wear, in which sculptured objects are used as body extremities and elements of set design in video performances. His sculptures and installations question the society of unavoidable effectiveness, in which there is no space for useless objects that do not have a practical and potentially monetary value. Furlan continues to question this topic in his most recent artworks. Within this exhibition he addresses the omnipresent idea of ‘common sense’, which is supposedly the criterion for rationality and efficiency. As a result, he presents seemingly trivial objects, which (possibly subconsciously) govern human lives. In his recognisable style, interwoven with self-irony and distanced from his own position, he exposes the absurdity of objects he created and the ideas that they represent. Due to their questionable functionality these seemingly common objects can be understood as merely (useless) works of art.
Miha Colnar
More on: Božidar Jakac Art Museum
Until Morning!
Until Morning!
Solo exhibition, Alkatraz Gallery, AKC Metelkova Mesto, Ljubljana, Slovenia
8 September 2020 – 30 September 2020 “Here I am again. I’m running out of time; the sketch book is full of ideas I don’t remember. The studio is full of trash, I’ve got coffee and milk, the evening is approaching. There’s another long night in front of me. Until morning, the next Wear has to be finished! Until morning! Wear VIII!!” Tomaž Furlan’s retrospective exhibition entitled Until Morning! presents a selection of the artist’s work of the past decade. Primarily, it is composed of two series, namely: Wear (VII-XXII), a series of absurd performative devices, predominatly welded together from parts of iron found by chance; and Morning, a more recent, formally more sculptural series. Tomaž Furlan, otherwise, is an academic sculpturer and a renowned artist, a recepient of The OHO Young Visual Artist Award and The Jakopič Recognition Award. In addition to his artistic work, in the past decade, and alongside his physical work including restoration, he also worked as a director of a youth centre and as a youth worker. He currently works part-time as an assistant at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana (ALUO), and as an occasional caretaker and postman there. Furlan grew up in a stonemason family from Škofja Loka, and it is precisely his craftsmanship background that essentially determined his decision to professionally choose art: ‘I was searching for a profession, where I would not be able to find its absolute knowledge. As Einstein said that an expert is someone who has made all mistakes in a certain area, I was searching for a profession where this would not be possible, and art is this kind of a profession, for sure. Art today has no climax.’ Furlan emphasizes the fact that he is both a caretaker and a professor at The Academy with a pround whine. A similar duality can be identified in his works from the series Wear. It is composed clumsily (and hysterically). Its artpieces appear rough and sophisticated at the same time. They are grotesquely realistic, with a certain comic component – one can either contemplate them or laught at them, although mostly one does both. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Furlan’s influences include both Marina Abramović and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Lars von Trier. The series Wear was being produced at the last minute, mostly during the night, a day or two before the exhibition. On the contrary, the series Morning is more deliberate, less impulsive, and conceived more long-term. Wear and Morning were created during the night and in early morning hours before Furlan starts work at The Academy, respectively. In terms of form and style, the two series in question are diametrically opposite. The past decade of Furlan’s life and work can be seen as a move from the night to the day – from being one of thousands to be cheated out of pay during construction industry crisis, to the present day being an established artist on the way of becoming a professor at the university. Nonetheless, the crisis has been accompanying him throughout, it made him stronger, and he internalised it: ‘Nothing can be so bad that it can’t be worse, the worst case scenarios have been realising all the time; which is not completely true, but the feeling never goes away.’ It is characteristic of Furlan that his works are created for exhibitions, just before their openings. After he receives an invitation, he waits for an inspiration, which is born just before the exhibition, out of agony. The works in Wear were thus created in a zealous way. Their ‘use’, too, requires zeal, but here is the catch; Furlan’s works are interactive in the most primary sense of the word: both in the way of production and consumption (usage), they lack distance. Thus, the paradox reveals itself: Furlan’s works are impersonal precisely in that they lack distance. What we see is what we do. Something similar can be said about Tomaž Furlan. We all know that his art is ingeniuos, but no one can say why precisely – his genius is visible at first glance, but it is also impossible to overlook. His artistic works possess not only freshness, humour, and abusurdity, but also incite a moment of wonder and vulgar sublimity. It is similary painful to interpret his works, as the interpretations vary from art history to useless theory in the sense of ‘he is interested in the material’ or ‘postfordism’. The artist himself best defines his works, when he talks about Wear XVII: ‘It is an attempt at fighting banality with stupidity.’
Miha Turk
More on: Alkatraz Gallery
Under the Surface, ARCOMadrid
Under the Surface, ARCOMadrid
Art fair ARCOMadrid, collaboration with P74 Gallery
26 February – 1 March 2020
P74 Gallery proudly presents a dialogue between two remarkable artists of different generations: the innovative practice of the young Tomaz Furlan and the post-conceptual practice of the middle-generation Joze Barsi. In their work, they both deal with objectness (Barsi: from the deconstruction of the sculptural object in the mid-1990s to a shift to architectural explorations of space and their subsequent expansion into installation), the autonomy of the subject, and individualization. The title Under the Surface implies synonyms such as “basement”, “depths”, “belly”, “ground”, “groundwork”, “pedestal”, “rest”, “substructure”, etc. Tomaz Furlan and Joze Barsi both show a specific interest in the strategies of re-use: Furlan in the construction processes of his “machines” and Barsi in the post-conceptual re-examination process of copying the overlooked and ignored texts of political philosophy and art.
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