TARWUK

At Martos Gallery, “Bijeg u noć” showcases the artist duo TARWUK, a collaboration between Croatia-born, New York-based artists Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić. Informed by the images and landscapes of Croatia’s bloody struggle for independence in the first half of the 1990s, themes of ruin and re-beginning intermingle in a temporally ambiguous landscape.

The experience of “Bijeg u noć,” or “Escape into the night,” is like a journey into the crypt of a forgotten world: atmospheric pencil drawings, light-wash acrylic, and sculptures of wax, scrap metals, rope, pigments, wood, plaster, salt, and flowers, give form to mystical beings that are ravaged and alien, with downturned faces and gutted bodies. In KLOSKLAS_eltrut/fFLASH (2019) a bruised human hand emerges from a base both biomorphic and bionic, made of steel, foam, schist, coffee, and wire. Rounding each corner delights anew with strange sculptures, irregular canvases, and runic wooden disks hung high like clocks or moons. The works are augmented by the space itself: lustrous exposed beams, pipes with mottled and peeling surfaces. TARWUK’s broken and post-human landscape recalls the apocryphal quote by Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”