NORA TURATO

Collating the information streams of the world in text pools, Turato publishes ‘scrapbooks of our culture’ once a year. For her performances, murals and enamelpanels alike, she culls from these collections that reflect not only her personalinfluences and surroundings but also act as seismographs of social preoccupations.Whilst Turato oscillates between different pitches and personas in her captivatingperformances, in her enamel and mural works, she uses graphic design as a tool toadjust tone, change a word’s inflection, or adopt a different type of voice. Employingwords as both medium and content, Turato turns familiar sentences into incisiveobservations of the ways in which language determines our everyday. Her variedworks examine the current era, which is marked by an abundance of words and theircontinuous repetition that causes their meaning to dwindle rapidly.

Each of the seven multi-part vitreous enamel panels is mounted on steel anddemonstrates a sculptural quality. Their phrases are rendered in a serif font, whichTurato developed in collaboration with Sam de Groot and Kia Tasbihgou. Reminiscentof 1980s vector graphics, the work’s grids depict tunnels with a central vanishing pointor round shapes in prime colors. A visual symbol of the decade, the grid isrepresentative of its optimism for technology and a computer-driven society.Previously synonymous with creating a futuristic space full of possibility, here itperhaps describes a future that never was. this place is sick / always something...(2023) proclaims the work’s title giving sentences in capitalized blue letters, while itsbackground pulls viewers into the red rabbit hole of a slanted matrix. Although theenamel works–which are constructed spaces, not illustrations–display a slick appearance akin to the marketing industry’s mass productions, they are the result of alaborious process that pushes the technical limits of both material and printmaking.These large-format panels are baked several times at 800 degrees, each layerpainted and fired separately. By combining bold, eye-catching questions such as ‘NOTYOURSELF?’ that evoke the overbearing tone of self-help culture with a lowercase(possibly inner) voice, Turato analyzes our tools for making sense of the world aroundus.

The artist’s wall paintings amplify the tension between form and content shegenerates through her slow and deliberate mode of production. Easily confused fordigital creations, their meticulous precision is achieved by hand; Turato designs stencilpatterns, which are printed on paper, taped to the wall, cut out and then filled withmultiple layers of paint. Discernible only from up close, subtle imperfections tell of theirmaking. The wall-covering murals present the background to the enamel panels, thuscausing friction between the rigor of the artist’s practice and the works’ fragmented,decontextualized messages.

Moving between light, hopeful moments and dark instances of existential dread, theshow reads as a poem, its rhythm provided by its colors and words. Turato’s glossyworks tap into an omnipresent phraseology and extend its short half-life to reveal aliminal space between prophecy and lunacy, perception and reality. Plucking,processing and performing contemporary concerns and parlance, the artist presentsstrangely intimate incantations that channel both the essence and the nonsense ofwhat collectively moves us.

Nora Turato (*1991, Zagreb) lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitionsinclude Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), Secession, Vienna (2021), MGLC:International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2020), Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf(2020), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2019), KunstmuseumLiechtenstein (2019) and Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2019). Nora Turato will bepresenting her work in an upcoming solo exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,later this year. Her works will be included in a group exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon andBrücke-Museum in Berlin, which opens in September.