New York-based Croatian artist duo TARWUK are known for their visceral works that invoke the archaeological, speculative and dystopian nature of human and personal growth and decay.
Read MoreTARWUK is an artist duo composed of New York-based Croatian artists Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić. While they had previously worked collaboratively on several projects, TARWUK was officially established in 2014.
In an interview with Stir World, they talked about their first studio in Chinatown: 'It was impossible to keep our practice separate from daily life, and it was more fun if there was no distinction. There was this energy between us and a huge potential that we felt we should harvest. We set off as two individuals making work together, then along the way we became a duo with a singular identity.'
The two artists see TARWUK as a condition through which they explore ideas of selfhood.
TARWUK work across various disciplines including drawing, painting, sculpture and video. Often using materials such as resin, wax, rope and wood, their installations embrace a sense of ambiguity and remain open to interpretation, allowing audiences to create their own understandings of the forms they create.
Tremow and Vukšić's upbringing in socialist Yugoslavia and post-socialist Croatia respectively has had a profound influence on their practice, having previously referenced their childhood's as being shaped by a 'warzone' and the separation of their families.
Much of their work has featured disfigured human forms, bridging the dystopian and science fiction yet also recalling archaeological digs and artefacts. While greatly left up to interpretation, their work invokes deeply personal memories and reflections, and promotes speculative imaginings for possible alternatives for the world.
In their work KLOSKLAS Tejivs kejivu Irog (semelion) (2021), TARWUK sculpts a human head connected to various abstracted and suspended appendages, strung together with aluminium posts, and presented on a pedestal. Composed of muted colours that remind the viewer of flesh and bones, this sculpture was constructed with visceral and bodily materials such as leather, horse and deer bones, and human teeth. A close-up of their work Tuzni Radar (2021) reveals that beneath a resin and clay head lies an interconnected network of wires and steel bursting at the seams.
TARWUK's 2021 solo exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti, Ante Mare et Terras, further explored the human body and the ways that it exists. Thinking through ideas of the unconscious, memory and identity, they string their varied works together through ideas of metamorphosis and deterioration. For this exhibition, they made public their shared drawings that, for a long time, had remained a private exploration in their studio. These ethereal sketches continue their explorations of selfhood and often feature impressions of human figures with varying degrees of detail.
TARWUK has held solo exhibitions at Collezione Maramotti, Italy; Matthew Brown, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Art, Osijek, Croatia; and Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at the Apalazzo Gallery, Italy; Frye Museum, Seattle; and the Drava Art Biennale, Osijek, Croatia.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2023
