Mitja Tušek

Circus Is Coming Home

Mitja Tusek moves freely within the canvas of the painting. Working with sequences that follow one another, he examines the various options of colors, materials and techniques : a very tactile basis from which he departs to generate image and meaning. The result is at first sight very different but continually strives to build up a tension between materialized abstraction and abstracted figuration. There is abstract in the sense that there is no clear representation. The figurative paintings are almost abstract, and in abstract paintings the presence of the image is never completely evacuated. The materials he uses are part of this ambivalence : wax, lead, pigment,… by their power of absorption or reflection, they induce an ambiguous perception of the image; we guess it more than we see it and yet we retain an almost palpable presence from it.

 

Tusek first drew the attention of the art world with his wax paintings, shown in 1992 at Documenta 9 curated by Jan Hoet in Kassel. Some of these works are figurative, but the layer upon layer of pigment and wax lend to a ghostly quality to the figurative elements, which, under certain conditions, seem almost to disappear.

 

A distinguishing, and admirable, quality in the work of this Swiss/Slovenian painter living in Brussels is that it raises questions without ever seeming pedantic or moralizing. His work is a rare thing these days: if it can be incredibly self-aware without dissolving into naval gazing and reducing its context to a set of easy truisims, it is precisely because its self-awareness is born from an eye – playful, sardonic, tongue-in-cheek – aware of the gaze of the other and always attuned on the mysteries just beyond the frame.

Artworks

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    Capture d’écran 2021-05-07 à 14.33.00

    Mitja Tušek

    Freizeit ist Arbeit

    12 June 2021 – 30 July 2021 12.06.2021 – 30.07.2021
    Ceysson & Bénétière, Wandhaff, Luxemburg

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    Capture d’écran 2019-07-05 à 17.37.05

    Mitja Tušek

    Le petit cercle bruxellois

    17 June 2019 – 1 September 2019 17.06.2019 – 01.09.2019
    A.VE.NU.DE.JE.TE - Institut de Carton, Brussels (BE)

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    Mitja Tušek

    Le Choix d'Albert

    17 May 2019 – 29 June 2019 17.05.2019 – 29.06.2019
    Xippas Genève, Geneva (CH)

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    Screen Shot 2018-12-21 at 14.24.17

    Mitja Tušek

    Salon de Peinture

    18 January 2019 – 17 February 2019 18.01.2019 – 17.02.2019
    M HKA, Antwerp (BE)

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    Capture d’écran 2018-09-08 à 12.16.51

    Mitja Tušek

    Ruimte voor actuele kunst

    28 October 2018 – 2 December 2018 28.10.2018 – 02.12.2018
    LLS Paleis, Antwerp (BE)

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    Mitja Tušek

    Lolo's Entanglements

    15 September 2018 – 9 December 2018 15.09.2018 – 09.12.2018
    Cultuurhuis de Warande, Turnhout (BE)

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    S3-Mitja-Tusek-2018-StEtienne-1080

    Mitja Tušek

    Life On Mars

    26 April 2018 – 2 June 2018 26.04.2018 – 02.06.2018
    Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Etienne, France

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