The Brooklyn Rail

Seeking a space to work in the winter of 2021, TARWUK seized the opportunity to occupy a large studio previously used by the painter Ron Gorchov, who had passed away the previous summer. Taken with its tall ceilings and almost stage-like architecture, the duo had a collective thought to create a large painting, but then it occurred to them that the scale of the canvas they tacked up on a 16×16 ft. wall suggested a theatrical backdrop. They then painted it as such and created costumes for themselves to perform abstruse tableaux vivant in that private setting. It was a situational epiphany that was to influence their subsequent aesthetics in a way that creatively subsumed both the dramatic craft of the demiurge and the spectatorial response of their audience. Hence, they positioned themselves to gracefully sidestep the merely representational import of figurative painting and sculpture, and with that move invited an improvisational dialectic of dramatic empathy to ensue. It’s a generous intent akin to what Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi has termed “conjunctive logic,” which, as he describes in a 2018 interview in El Diario, is “…a vibrating and ambiguous interpretive dimension. Perhaps the best example would be an affectionate courtship.” Since TARWUK consists of the married partners Ivana Vukšic and Bruno Pogacnik Tremow, such a conceptual extrapolation of the couple-form makes sense; yet in their case, it’s an extrapolation unconditioned by a role- restrictive, heteronormative context of that form, since each of them has an ever-evolving hand in each of their creations. So, not only does their approach problematize the typical partitions of theatrical action and audience reaction, but also the traditional relation of individual agency to the couple-form. Interestingly, their conjunctive logic is such that it operates as a kind of proxy conduction of art, something that in the past may have been considered a post-modern abdication of authorial identity. In their hands, it serves to open the door to an irrepressible host of authorial locum tenens.

According to their deployment of theatrics as symbolic form, TARWUK has “staged” a series of large oil and acrylic paintings across the capacious architecture of Matthew Brown’s inaugural New York space. Interspersed between are sculptures that seem to serve as working models for the histrionics displayed in the paintings. Also included are a series of smaller works on paper that give insight to a monastic dimension for iteration of the larger paintings, which are hung high, at approximately proscenium height, and topped by a painted lintel entablature that transects almost the entire installation. The main event of these mural-like paintings unfolds as an antique panorama might, or as stele in an ancient frieze. A description of each is a challenge to critical interpretation, so packed full of larger than life-sized figures, multiple architectural perspectives, and symbolic minutia as they are. Upon viewing these works, it becomes apparent that TARTWUK are steeped in art historical precedents such as James Ensor’s clamoring faces in crowds, Diego Rivera’s strident masses, and Max Beckman’s tortuous ensemble casts. These progenitors made their significant works during personal times of war and social upheaval, an autobiographical note shared by TARWUK, having grown up in Croatia during the wars that saw Croatian independence and the dissolution of its former Yugoslavian incorporation. They have related in an interview that such dis-integration played out as locally as a street sign changing overnight to delineate new state/identitarian status or neighbors displaced or ostracized by their religious, ethnic, or political associations. Such a background of fundamental instability inflects their epic compositions.

MRTISKLAAH HTIDE (.revo selbmuts dna moor eht sretne NERØS ssenkrad eht nI .esuaP) (2024) features a male figure prominently posed in a Renaissance doublet and leggings surrounded by a cadre of both attentive and disinterested faces, figures, and masks of varying gender and comportment. His outfit is encrusted with scraps of painted fabric collage set in a microcosmic sub-composition that enhances his dramatic persona, while an androgynous disembodied head lies at his feet next to a monkey-like dog figure lifting its paw in anthropomorphic response. The uppermost section of the canvas is occupied by figures akin to the gallery in Shakespearean theater or the section reserved for Elizabethan gentry, yet this social partition appears, in TARWUK’s version, to have collapsed and its audience spilled into the action playing out on the stage itself. At their feet lay a prone and naked female figure as if to analogize their exposure and transposition as passive spectators. Another composition, MRTISKLAAH. em revo sehsa ot denrub ti dna esuoh a deretne I (2024) depicts a central female figure striding in a stiff and ceremonial gesture ¹similar to a goddess embedded in an Egyptian processional frieze. She is shadowed intimately behind by a male figure in an opaque white mask tapping her shoulder and whispering conspiratorially into her ear. The upper architecture of this painting opens up to reveal a section of cerulean blue firmament framed in a gilded arch, as if the couple is making their exit at stage left, which beckons with sparkling flora in an imagined garden. Rather than a large cast of supporting figures, their background is occupied by a sparser group and most prominently by a beturbaned, seemingly maternal, figure whose back is turned to this conjugal exodus. The intriguing thing about such implied dramatic narratives in each large painting, as seen within the overall installation, is how they don’t follow one another in a predictable plot, and the artists seem to have mixed up any symbolic cues intentionally as if to undermine the viewer coming to any predictable conclusions of their own. Consider how MRTISKLAAH_.rovivrus elos eht; eert a ot dehsal dnuof erew uoY(2024) irrupts into the array, mid sequence, with an almost fairytale vision of a child-like figure kneeling to present a monumental stork with a modest bouquet of flowers. Bracketing this scene is a fruiting tree painted a deep crimson and a table of elders presenting their symbolic bird for filial adoration. Specters of Slavic folktales such as The Firebird and The Frog Princess haunt such an image, and this constant delving into the artists’ deep cultural history in the Balkan (and before that, Byzantine) diaspora distinctly patinas TARWUK’s entire production. On a formal level, this vibration is readily evident in their densely decorative compositions that channel and telegraph ancient Illyrian mosaics and traditional Croatian lacework and needlepoint. And their overall palette of closely valued, primarily earth toned hues imparts a palpable chromatic dimension to this history.

The show’s title, Good night, Ernst Toller! offers further insight into the artists’ conceptual approach to both art and worldmaking. Toller was a German expressionist playwright who was imprisoned for his Socialist political activities from 1920 to 1925. As a political activist and a Jew, he was exiled when Hitler came to power in 1933. He remained uncompromising in his dedication to the revolutionary potential of poetry and theater until his death by suicide in 1939. iIn his biography, I Was A German, he is quoted as stating, “And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.” Toller’s passion may seem hopelessly romantic and outdated in our overly technical present, socially conditioned as it is by commercial platforms for the extension of networking logic at the expense of conjunctive logic, yet an infusion of such a passion may just be the antidote to cynical social disengagement. TARWUK, in their own fashion, seem attuned to such a transformative turn.