Hysteria and her Two Retro Friends

IRWIN exhibition in SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana
29. Oct. - 28. Nov. 2004

The exhibition Hysteria and its Two Retro Friends by the Irwin group, presents a selection of mostly new paintings and drawings, which make part of the Irwin Icons cycle. Hysteria and its Two Retro Friends aims to re-establish the connection with the local Ljubljana scene, since it epitomises the title of the group's first exhibition at the Skuc Gallery exactly twenty years ago. Hysteria and its Two Retro Friends is at the same time also an extension of the IRWIN ICONS exhibition segment, which was presented last year, as part of the larger project Irwin:Retroprincip 1983-2003, at Berlin's Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hag, and this year, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade.

Since 1983, the Irwin artist group has been working with various media, from painting to public art, from sculptural works and installations to publishing. Following their "retro principle", the group utilizes and combines different motifs, symbols and signs from the fields of politics and art, which results in the transformation of their historical meaning and content, and in the re-contextualisation and deconstruction of their related ideologies.

Within the whole opus of the Irwin group, Irwin Icons present a cycle of paintings which are work in progress, having been classified into five groups from the mid-90s onwards: the Cross, Sower, Malevich Between the Two Wars, the Stag, and Cup of Coffee. By way of citing art historical patterns and signs in accordance with the artistic method of the "retroprinciple" the group also makes use of its own older works, in such a way summarising the repertoire of motifs which stems right back to the beginnings of the group when it had just begun to use important and less known historical artistic sources.

With the continued recontextualisation of motif and its meaning, triggered by each new work from the Irwin Icon series, the freedom of composition and implementation of motifs devised according to its own regulations, is an important part also of each individual work. This type of artistic method, which allows for an abundance of the most various compositions, is based on the individual decision of each of the members of the group by whom the given task is to be executed.
The exhibition Hysteria and its Two Retro Friends at the Skuc Gallery precisely aims to highlight the quality of these individual works, or their authors, acting within the Irwin collective. The five members of the group Dusan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, Borut Vogelnik are presenting themselves with a group of selected Irwin Icons, which the curator of the exhibition Gregor Podnar has arranged according to individual author, in accordance with the principles of selection already known to us as the artistic theory of combinations of motifs present in the making of the Irwin Icons, especially in keeping with the principle of one's own subjective aesthetic criteria.