VIENNA — Not way back, Tamuna Sirbiladze was maybe finest often called the spouse of Franz West. The Georgian artist, who died of cancer-related causes in 2016, shortly after her first New York exhibition, won’t have minded: Sirbiladze and West, each artists, had been companions in life and in artwork, collaborating on a number of initiatives. Nearly as good as these initiatives are, although, denying the artist her personal highlight is like burying a volcano.
Not Cool however Compelling at Belvedere 21, curated by Sergey Harutoonian with Vasilena Stoyanova, is a becoming title for Sirbiladze’s first institutional survey — a formidable overview that hopefully will result in additional exhibitions of her work. Organized into themed sections that observe a free chronology, it begins with a small grouping of scholar works close to the doorway, separated from the remainder of the present by a room divider that acts as a slash between her youth in Georgia and her fuller inventive life in Vienna. The early works, largely in darkish colours, mired in modernist abstraction, trace at her artwork’s expressiveness, however they don’t put together guests for the wrenching intimacy and depth that observe.
With a couple of smaller and extra reserved exceptions, Sirbiladze painted massive and wild — qualities that inevitably align her with the Viennese Actionists of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s and the German Neo-Expressionist artists of the Eighties and ’90s, given her location and cultural second. And there’s some affinity; one portray straight references Martin Kippenberger (“Kippi,” 2010) and all of the artists in these teams provoked visceral responses with their work. But the present’s most putting items are these for which the exuberant physicality of her gestures coheres (generally simply barely) into the feminine determine, in all of its simmering and explosive corporeality.
Amongst these work, two of probably the most distinctive are “Suicide Portray” (2007) and “Kotzen” (2005). Each middle loosely rendered, virtually cartoonish feminine types: within the former, the girl leans backward, wide-eyed, a pointy diagonal behind her (or going by way of her); within the latter, she stands in a toilet, vomiting right into a sink, the tilted partitions and purple ground closing in on her. The picture remembers Conrad Felixmüller’s shell-shocked 1918 print “Soldier in a Madhouse,” transposed onto ladies’s lives and bodily capabilities.
These two works are distinctive of their narrative and pictorial bluntness, and in Sirbiladze’s development of the figures as characters whose actions and expressions are roughly readable, somewhat than unspecific our bodies. The gut-punch of each ought to be undercut by the abjection and awkwardness of the eventualities, however as a substitute they churn with the turmoil of life, like feelings sketched in actual time.
The identical uncooked feeling, filtered by way of an exacting inventive hand and thoughts to create a palpable visible impact, carries all through the present. In “Tryangel” (2007), a determine sitting subsequent to what appears to be like like a syringe curls right into a ball in the course of one other tilted inside, forming a spiral, whereas “Lenin’s Bulb” (2005) exhibits a nude, skinny girl floating in a darkish grey area, an evening sky or void. Different portraits comprise only a few speedy brush strokes, coaxing a determine from a flurry of gestural exercise (as within the chaotic, unnerving “My Rapist” or the sparse, jittery markings of “When a Child Was Pissing in Her Stomach,” each from 2006). These pictures present individuals suspended between coming into being and shedding themselves.
What makes the work so visually arresting is, partly, the artist’s attraction to paint. In “Comme des Garçons, Odeur 53” (c. 2000), named for an avant-garde “anti-perfume” scent by the eponymous style line, Sirbiladze swaps the nippiness of postmodern critiques of capitalism for the warmth of a saturated purple canvas. An O form (or bathroom seat) containing a sketch of a rest room on the middle, coupled with the purple expanse, summons a number of associations with bodily fluids and capabilities. Additionally making daring use of purple are the summary “Think about Metaphor” (2011) and “Lack of Backyard” (2014), with their fire- and ruby- and blood-red unruliness.
Trauma is a touchstone in a lot artwork and tradition as we speak. Sirbiladze’s work clearly alluded to it, and a few work can really feel too private or painful for public show. However the present can also be a tribute to her inventive inspirations, from Warhol to van Gogh to Proust, and private ones — her portrait of West and work of her youngsters, and her ultimate huge, meandering drawings trying again to her Georgian previous, executed in oil stick on big, unstretched canvases. Not Cool however Compelling is like moving into an artist’s inside world in all of its protean humanity. That Sirbiladze will not be right here to information us by way of is a loss that can deepen as her artwork will get extra publicity. However what stays is a drive of nature.
Tamuna Sirbiladze: Not Cool however Compelling continues at Belvedere 21 (Arsenalstraße 1, Vienna, Austria) by way of August 11. The exhibition was curated by Sergey Harutoonian with assistant curator Vasilena Stoyanova.