Processes of growth and transformation find nourishment from their environment; they incorporate it in order to create something new. The fact that in recent times, Nikola Ukić has literally let his sculptures grow up like mushrooms from the bare ground so that the portions of their different locations which remain adhering to them initially seems surprising. However, it is all the more astonishing to see how self-evidently earth, stones or sand combine with the works. The distinction between natural and synthetic materials becomes an irrelevance. Here, it is not only, as with Pollock, a “personal union between the artist and nature-as-artist”1 that takes place, but, as a key further step, a “material union” between artistic and natural material. Ukić has abandoned an idealised and ideologised notion of nature that differentiates between nature and culture. Susanne Pfeffer’s observation regarding a young generation of artists in the context of the exhibition nature after nature, which she curated: “Distinctions between synthetic and organic, humanly and naturally made are rejected,”2 also applies to him.

Exhibition Views