
An exhibition of new paintings by the Melbourne-based artist Tim Bučković, his debut exhibition with 1301SW.
Artefacts, once a present, now a past. Removed from a time, a context, a position, sitting in a now, a state of tumultuous contemporaneity, ripe with its images and sanitation (stagnation). The artefact (object) bringing with it the history of images, bountiful baggage of symbolism and simulacra, unfolding onto the abstracted topographies of the now.
Topography, wandered over by the historic peasantry, where modernist monuments grow, pulling like an altar with its unseen magnetism, now left behind to endure the melancholic evenings — south of the Baltic, left in from the Caucasus. Failed dreams for/from the future.
The positive magnetism of the flows, movements and patterns that were pulled from somewhere, plucked with purpose — perceived and revered — to be wholly absorbed and articulated — renamed, reimagined. Played out into a new topography of wanderers and obsessives — leaf dwellers.
Across from this, situated in another field, the stagnation fuelled by endless sanitation, a plethora of parishioners devoid of magnetism (and spirit), only finding gospel, no artefacts, just revered false idols. Not a martyr in sight, but the stones at their feet demand they stay. Dusk.
An epilogue for monsters whose agency is unclear (cryptic and speculative), yet their existence is palpable and confirmed. Now left to its own devices, afflicting some nameless, distant person in the course of an ordinary afternoon.




Tim Bučković produces paintings and drawings that begin as labyrinthine scenes, where delicate gestures of both full and cropped figures are held within undulating landscapes composed with mosaic-like texture. Alluding to both a mood and dynamism found in the historic peasantry and the socialist architecture of his biographical home of Eastern Europe, there is a naturally cryptic and speculative shell coating his narratives. Figures seem to gather in groups captivated by an unseen magnetism, while repeated signs and conditions echo across the works surface creating abstracted topographies. These graphic devices weaving throughout the staged compositions offer a unique “presence”, an agency created via a cyclical condition, an unending act of balancing and ordering his canvases in an attempt to translate the individual’s personal phenomena into something exterior. Bučković’s approach to colour and form has seen him make impressionistic works of a seemingly spiritual quality, suggesting that they exist in a place where their content refers to a fragmented holding pattern of resolve. This truly unique approach to painting is made via a rich layering process, where the linen he works on is given as much attention as the painted forms eventually becoming visible on the surface. Nodding to the Modernist art of Yugoslavia, both the Düsseldorf and Cologne schools of painting, and more understated figures of the 20th Century — both artistic and otherwise — Bučkovic’s practice is rich in a grounded history, but expansive in its own vocabulary.

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