Devotion

The group exhibition “Devotion” presents the works of artists: Predrag Terzić, Nataša Kokić, Stratis Tavlaridis and Vasilis Botoulas, who, although working in different styles, use similar precise repetitive motions creating works of art with patiently executed marks that testify their time spent in creating them, writing their own history. It seems like they have been doing the same act and employing their technique of choice almost to its exhaustion.

Devotion, as an exhibition concept, symbolizes a commitment to working in the chosen technique through careful performance that takes place over long periods of time. The works presented are performed in a different temporal context, in which the artist is omnipresent in his work, leaving a trace of the time spent as evidence of his own existence. In this context, commitment is an act that gives the artist absolute freedom of expression and exploration of the self. In today’s world of magnitude, digital and industrial mass production, and the blurred boundaries between original and copy; thus conceived and in a sense a meditative process of work, it also carries with it an artistic aura, as defined by Walter Benjamin in the essay “A work of art in the age of its technical reproduction”. The spectres of Terzić, the pellucid objects and wavy animas of Tavlaridis, the deep yet ghostly presence of Botoulas ́ points and lines, and the unpopulated ambients and land- scapes in Kokic ́s drawings, all point to an identification with the soul, of a single human presence, like wavy animas wondering around a universe constructed for them. One that allows for slow processes and where repetitive actions are a choice that results in material expression of the artist‘s own and of our world.