Text by CLOT Magazine
Impossible Machines is the first comprehensive overview of works by Slovenian artist Meta Grgurevič. A collaboration between UGM | Maribor Art Gallery, Künstlerhaus Graz, and The Marignoli di Montecorona Foundation in Spoleto is on view until March 1, 2020, at UGM | Maribor Art Gallery in Maribor, Slovenia.
The works of Meta Grgurevič, with their low-tech, even archaic mechanisms, are reminiscent of the original gesture of modern kinetic art when Duchamp thought to mount a bicycle wheel on a stool as he found it comforting to watch it spin. Meta’s machines are also immensely comforting, reminding us of something we have always known and reassuring us that the world around us is the way we think it is. Which, of course, is pure utopia. Says curator Simona Vidmar about Grgurevič’s work.
Meta Grgurevič studies and constructs kinetic systems and assembles them into multidimensional settings to explore art in relation to technology and to the process of materialisation of scientific and artistic ideas and approaches artmaking as a collaborative effort, working together with other artists, incorporating performativity as a key element of the artistic process and shaping a work of art into a total experience.
Studying and imagining different mechanisms or kinetic systems, discovering how they operate, the impact of their existence and their rules of inner workings, has always spurred my interest and pushed me towards an unexpected experience. Through the years of making art, I have begun to understand the definition of a fully functioning system as a metaphor for my own system in relation to and responsibility toward the social environment, based on a reflection about the cooperation between individuals and the fusion of different entities into a poetic whole. Grgurevič says when talking about her intellectual process.
Meta Grgurevič has participated at the 56th Venice Biennial, at the 13th Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, and at the 30th International Biennial of Graphic Arts with co-artist Urša Vidic, among others.
