The group show »Riss« – (Disruption) is a cooperation between Hengesbach Gallery and Frontviews, an independent curatorial platform in Berlin. Frontviews develops concepts for exhibitions devoted to current issues in cultural philosophy. From March 09 to April 20, Stephan Köhler will present three young positions there: Nikola Ukic, an artist represented by Hengesbach Gallery, Amir Fattal, an Israeli artist, and the duo Tolia Astali and Dylan Peirce, who have Georgian and French roots. Using different recourses, the works on display deal with the past. In these works, time is no longer experienced on a purely chronological basis but rather materially in space. In this sense, the exhibition title »Riss« – (Disruption) not only refers to a break of historical continuity but also to the cracks (ger.: Risse) in the material and the stopping of processes.

Nikola Ukic (*1974 in Rijeka, Croatia) develops his works using dynamic materials, such as polyurethane. To find a form, the artist doesn’t only explore various aggregate physical states but rather actively reacts to the uncontrollable expansion of the material. On the one hand, the artist uses such elements of chance in the process to suggest and invert memories of formation strategies. On the other hand, he deliberately works with the capriciousness of the materials refusing static forms, that he, for instance, mounts on the surfaces of his objects using photography. As such, he uses photographs of classical modernism sculptures, as those from Hans Arp or Henry Moore, to expose them to a process of expansion of the material. This, in turn, can act like a ‘chemical Jackson Pollock’ on the templates. Decisive for his work method is the acceptance of processes that undermine the faith in the strength and validity of abstract forms as a modernist utopia.

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