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The Incomparable Differences

by miodrag šuvaković | pdf

Repro.

Dejan Grba, Kraftwerk P-b-M, digital video, 1998.

From his Stealth project (Dom omladine Gallery, Belgrade, 1996) and his painting series [The Blue Lotus (1998-2001)] to video works [Kraftwerk P-b-M (1998)], Dejan Grba has established a radical critique of expressionism by the non-expressionist and conceptual problematizing of the appearance and the sense of mass- and techno-image in relation to the differences between public and private gaze. In painting and, somewhat later, in his digital works, Grba has elaborated the various approaches to the ‘screen phenomenon’: from the painted screen to the electronic screen in which the image is generated.

The role of figure in his works is a kind of the ‘symptom’ of the gaze that becomes recognized and distinguished from the object of gaze: between its ‘self-ness’ and the notion of the ‘alien’. At the Stealth exhibition he presented the works of secret (unattainable) authors and the representation of the trivial (visible), and vice-versa: the representation of secret (visible) and the representation of the trivial (unattainable). This turn is characteristic in popular culture and, most notably, in the American fiction film which Grba references.

Miodrag Šuvaković, Serbian Art in the 20th Century, Volume 1: Radical Art Practices, pp. 733-735: Transition in the Condition of War / The Arts of Transition: The The Incomparable Differences, Orion Art, Belgrade, 2010.