
An exhibition of new paintings by the Melbourne-based artist Tim Bučković, his second exhibition with 1301SW, and first at the Sydney gallery
.... morning, I stare at pillars in the morning. Shadows cast from pillars in the morning. Architecture articulating attributes. Verticality.
I’m outside, looking in, surrounded by towers to triumph. Crumbling, tearing from history, I linger like a chimney lone in a field. We are remnants. I’m a figure in the morning, a pillar with a shadow.
I look at a searing light, the sun and everything else. I’m a figure among and staring at figures. Frozen or am I in motion? Hard to tell. Still or somewhat still. Have I fallen? Hard to tell.
This scenography is in slow motion, time in transit on a crawling train.
I crawl out at morning. Crowds and commotion in the morning. I don’t like confrontation. I hide behind pillars, behind history, in the shadows,
of pillars.






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.
1301SW was founded in 2022 in Naarm/Melbourne’s inner-south, embracing the region while having strong roots internationally. Extending from its Melbourne base, the gallery expanded its unique and ambitious exhibition program to Gadigal/Sydney with the opening of a second gallery space in late 2024.

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