Ziga Kariz

b. 1973, Slovenia

Televisual image, with its telepresence of spectacular images, is the theme of the paintings by Ziga Kariz; there, the screen is the means of beaming the images of urban catastrophe and violence, among others, into the private sphere. Kariz makes the iconosphere of televisual and film violence confront the artistic language and elements of modernism, mostly derived from the work of Piet Mondrian. The juxtaposition of contemporary visual escalation of the images of fear with the asceticism of modernist utopia of form that regulates social interaction proves to be a far-reaching commentary on post-modernist preoccupation with mirror images, reflecting ideological conflict and the spectacle function of the media. The Kariz picture is all at once an investigation of contemporaneity, such as it is seen in media images, and a reflection of previous artistic definitions of form, as seen in, and transformed by, contemporary events. This confronting of the avant-garde utopia with the spectacle of violence thus ends up in a sophisticated insight into the genealogy of contemporaneity, where the avant-garde utopia acquires the function of quality design, with the world of images escalating into previously unimagined forms.

— Tomislav Vignjeviz (from catalogue essay for Media in Painting, Cankarjev dom Gallery)

(Text: imagine limerick catalogue, 2004)