“With the Gallery” is the name of this second exhibition that David Maljkovic is opening in Brescia on Saturday, September 26.
It is an exhibition that reveals not a business relationship so much as a friendship, not a job contract so much as a common wavelength, not a business relationship so much as a set of shared interests.
In 2010, David created an exhibition worthy of a small museum at our gallery. The space was turned into a theater, with blue curtains draped to hide the paintings and collages, with two projections greeting the visitor, with complex installations blurring the border between architecture and painting.
In his work, these two modes complement each other, illuminate each other, blend together, through reworkings of sculptures from the past that conjure up an atmosphere from bygone times and modern ones.
And so we became friends, as well as accomplices, and not long ago David came to the gallery to see its secret side: the storage area, the stockroom, the archives, the books.
We talked about the details and all those boring tasks that underlie any project, that is, any successful one. Those actions we have to do over and over in order to achieve a result and obtain our fifteen minutes of fame in the art world.
For Maljkovic, “With the Gallery” means putting himself on our side.
“It’s a show I couldn’t do with anybody else,” he explained to me, and this fills us with pride. Not that our gallery is more important than others. Maybe it’s just that our quiet interaction (David keeps a low profile in human relations) has produced a commonality of goals over time.
In any case, the show will present images of the gallery “arranged” with his customary methods and objects of ours organized into groups, collected and exhibited on shelves in midair, to be looked at from below, in the attempt to grasp not only the work of this young genius, but the work of a now “classic” gallery that is still trying to dance with the latest isms of the avant-gardes, if one can still use the term avant-garde.
Massimo Minini
Born in Rijeka, Croatia in 1973, in recent years David Maljkovic has explored the cultural, social and political heritage around him, in an ongoing dialogue between past, present, and future. Having risen to international attention as one of the most interesting artists of our day, he is featured in the 56th Venice Biennale, “All the World’s Futures”, curated by Okwui Enwezor.
