Sprüth Magers is pleased to present Turato’s first solo show with the Los Angelesgallery. The exhibition extends across both gallery floors and showcases pool 6, theartist’s latest body of work that comprises a performance, the premiere of a videowork alongside new enamel panels and a site-specific wall painting. Anchoring theworks and released on the occasion of the show is Turato’s sixth pool publication—the current installment of anthologies of colloquial speech and found text shecompiles from a myriad of sources. Picking up the thread of her commission for the2023 Performa Biennial as well as her 2023 presentation at Sprüth Magers, Berlin,Turato investigates and interprets the mechanisms of the anxiety-driven culture ofself-optimisation.

‘I NEED SOME HEALING,’ declares one of Turato’s multipart vitreous enamel works inbold red lettering, while another line states, ‘this isn’t me,’ addressing two loomingquestions of our hyper-capitalist digital age: How can I feel better? And what doesauthenticity mean? Each of the deftly designed, large-scale panels in the downstairsgallery, glossy and intensely coloured, features an all-caps text that functions as anemphasised headline, along with a lowercase sentence above or below it. With its playbetween graphic and spatial hierarchy, this isn’t me / i need some healing (2024)presents a reversible reading order and suggests varying or contradictory inner voicessplit, perhaps, by a barrage of external influences. The slab serif typeface employedthroughout all works on view was produced by Turato, in collaboration with Sam deGroot and Kia Tasbihgou, to reflect the tone of pool 6.

Installed nearby, i’m going clear / total organization is necessary! (2024) refers todisparate areas of culture: It calls to mind the jargon of new religious movementscentred on overcoming past trauma and living to one’s full potential, as well as the thoughts of Robert De Niro’s character, the disconnected, traumatised _Taxi Driver_(1976) whose existential angst descends into violent paranoia in a film released duringthe golden age of self-help. As with all of Turato’s works, these allusions function aspsychological and cultural Rorschach tests that gauge viewers’ projections andframes of reference while establishing fresh interconnections. Echoing old-fashionedadvertising signs, the enamel panels are produced in a lengthy process with severalrounds of firing. The works’ inherent tension is produced between content andmedium: Turato channels what is in the ether into uncanny poems on impermanenceand inscribes them onto unfading, durable surfaces. Two murals, whose near-digitalprecision is achieved by hand, draw the viewer into the themes of pool 6 and provideanother layer of context.

For her performance, Turato metamorphoses into a medium for several differentpersonalities. Through intense training with a voice and dialect coach and delvingdeeper into the language of the body, the artist has increased her vocal range and herability to fully embody the characters she portrays. Utilising the parlance associatedwith personal transformation, Turato’s script holds a magnifying glass to the paradoxof practices that are aimed at deflating the ego but instead encourage individualismand self-aggrandising. Self-care, a term once used by the Black Panthers to describecommunity connection and the efforts to care for the marginalised and mistreated,has ironically been skewed to function as a way to comfort and adjust the self within aneoliberal society. Turned into a commodified cure, the gospel of self-improvement isused to justify anything; the ego—the overwhelming centre of attention—needsproducts, apps, retreats and workshops to succeed. And so one of Turato’s skillfullyhoned personas asks, “What has prevented you from crushing it?” To which theimplied answer is, of course, ‘you.’

In the upstairs gallery, a video work continues to explore the relationship betweenlanguage and its underlying ideology. Based on the performance, a choreography ofwords unfolds on a wall-sized screen and turns each term into an image, which isstylistically accompanied by Turato’s voice, rhythm and emphasis. Offering offbeatinsights into the public psyche, pool 6 raises questions around self-betterment andself-governing, success and competition, the monetisation of life and reality, andpseudoscience marketing. Turato’s visual and textual interplay forms a fascinatingthesis on our times.

Nora Turato (*1991, Zagreb) lives and works in Amsterdam. She will headline Art OnThe Mart’s program with a commissioned work in spring 2024, on view concurrentlywith a performance at the Art Institute Chicago. Her performance Cue The Sun wascommissioned by Performa and premiered during the Performa Biennial 2023 in NewYork. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022),Secession, Vienna (2021), Centre Pompidou, Paris, MGLC: International Centre ofGraphic Arts, Ljubljana, and Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (all 2020), SerralvesMuseum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2019), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2019), andBeursschouwburg, Brussels (2019).