Currently on view at 303 Gallery are recent paintings by Serbian-born, London-based artist Djordje Ozbolt. Ozbolt's quirky and surreal works reference several artistic styles and examine modern society's ineffective attempts at communcating "with each other, with nature, or with the spirit world." As the show's press release states, Ozbolt's "scenes acknowledge the peculiar arrangement of the modern world, as absurdist intervention overlaps with humanist tendencies and primeval emotion."
In his piece Offering, a woman dressed in robes and topped off with a halo kneels and looks heavenward, bearing a bizarre and funny offering of "a bird with talons made of flowers and a rosary made of Vienna sausages." The oddness of her gift/sacrifice suggests "a sort of confused desperation" or perhaps a case of complete cluelessness. In Fear, a wide-set pair of eyes peek out from a gray, splotchy haze. It is unclear if the owner of the eyes is the one afraid or if the viewer should fear the concealed subject. Femme Fumant Une Pipe vaguely displays a cartoonish woman's face, a pair of breasts, and a smouldering pipe amidst a wild tangle of rainbow colored lines while Silent Dialogue shows a stoned looking monkey contentedly blowing colorful, lava lamp-like bubbles out of a long pipe while a bird perched on a branch quietly watches. Referencing Picasso's Portrait of Sabartes, Ozbolt's Portrait of a Noble Bubbleman depicts the "subject in a perpetual state of slow disapperance. With a face made exclusively of bubbles on the point of explosion, the Bubble man is allegorically exposed as a fragile, shifting being"—perhaps implying that we too are vulnerable and directionless like his delicate Bubbleman. Learn more at 303gallery.com. Through January 22nd.
Silent Dialogue, 2010
Fear, 2010
Offering, 2010
Noble Bubble Man, 2010
Femme Fumant Une Pipe, 2010
Father Figure, 2010
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