GALLERY MC | NEW YORK

Olgica Antovska " Escalations" at Gallery MC

November 20 - November 30, 2008
Opening Reception: THURSDAY, Nov. 20th, 5.30 - 6.30 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday- Saturday, 12 - 6 pm

Escalations

This project – exhibition of Olgica Antovska, has primarily been focused on the functioning of three formally different groups, comprised of three separate parts. Through each of them she is trying to establish a relation which reveals the presence of tension, the level of excitement of which, has been reached in the dialogue between visual structure and the message, although the desired aesthetic strategy has not been neglected. On her part, the initiated title Escalations (which in most part refers to photographs – with recognizable fragments) simply generates the dimensional national identity, what is more, in such circumstances when there is lack of precise accent on progress or conflict, while on the other hand, through the images alluding to a fictive potential world (as an alternative) adapts to the artistic anti-illusionism, understood as a criticism to common reality. The positions of her expression, where the object-like dimension of the painting is stressed as opposed to the flatness, are directed partly towards accomplishing unity of meaning, which provokes a direct presence, and at same time, concrete definition of each separate work. The intention to create a perspective by using pure plastic elements, that is through surface and colours, resulted in simplified and visually controlled construction of the painting. It emerges from the experiences of the reductive geometric abstraction, but also fits into the analytic paining, through which her talent for the structural, or to be more precise, for the logical, semantic and syntactic problems of optical shaping, related to post-minimalistic fashion, has been confirmed. Not less worthy of attention is monochromy, with her through an expressive impulse, which comes from the uneven, gesture-like application of paint. Her skillfully conceptualized hidden allusions, draw back your attention from the essential aspects of the piece,then from the pictorial composition, especially, from the reduced composition, which again is reduced to “texture” or to flat surface. The established meanings of art, seen inside the frames of the medium of painting (as part of the abstract art) or photography, to its greatest extent are based on the concept of monotony, which loyally reflects both existential and perceptive-mental focus towards the logical “discharge” in comments. Her decision to preferably choose the monotonous visual rhythm is in relation to achieving contrasts such as (black-white-red or a combination of yellow-golden-green), which symbolically refer to conditions (recognized in the titles alone) inviting you to cultural, religious or contemplations of different kind. In view to the creative indications of Olgica Antovska, making a distance from the sensitive perceptions where nothing is secretive or mystic, merely bends those historic norms which are not censured as a result of the artist’s own “insecurity“.

Marika Bochvarova-Plavevska