David Maljković

Painting has always been more than the material sum of what is created in the studio out of canvas, colour, and stretcher frame. This is also evident in David Maljković’s artistic practice since the mid-1990s, when painting became an open field which the artist used to transfer his experience with this particular medium into other artistic media. It was inscribed into the pictoriality of his objects, video works, and spatial installations. To which extent painting can represent a discursive field in order to articulate the relations between image, space, and time can be experienced in the project at Cukrarna Gallery. Here, painting no longer acts as a mediator but as a speaking voice.

On view are works, produced since 2017, in which David Maljković has created stunning image constellations linking two worlds, as Gilles Deleuze argued in his lectures on painting that deal with the defined and the undefined, chaos and order, figure and ground. In this regard, Maljković’s works create multi-layered image constellations of space and time, which interrelate in a dynamic manner, thereby opening up new semantic processes. In these processes, not only the persona of the painter, his colour palette, canvas, and easel but also reflections on painting and art in general are at stake.

As in earlier projects, David Maljković relates to the heritage of the (South-) Eastern European avant-garde and its relevance for today. According to the artist himself he gauges “the idea of painting as a guardian of time and the painter’s position as its witness” on several levels by interweaving the past and the present. This reveals an “open malleability of time folding in upon itself, a sort of ontological multitemporal existence”. It shapes the pictorial language and turns out to be a strong force in the way it reverberates in the exhibition at Cukrarna Gallery. In this acting upon the complexity of time and space, the question arises as to the artist’s own positioning and what materiality of time we witness. Questions that are highly relevant, not least also because of the turning point in history that we are currently witnessing.