DRAGO PERSIC
Opening: 08/11/2007 7pm
Exhibition: 09/11/2007 – 12/01/2008


Press release

Engholm Engelhorn Galerie is proud to present the début solo exhibition of Drago Persic, a recent graduate of Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Seven new paintings by the artist make up the exhibition.

Seen together, they represent fleeting moments in a larger narrative whose exact nature or conclusion is never revealed. The artist’s palette contains no colour, just black and white and a number of different of greys made from mixing them, while his line is precise and seemingly dispassionate. These decisions allow the viewer to concentrate more fully on the paintings’ construction in an attempt to make sense of their enigmatic subjects and the tension between absence and presence, what we can see and what we can’t.

There is a distinctly filmic quality to the composition and silent suspense of many of the paintings. The recurrence of certain details in different works gives weight to the suggestion that somehow this is all connected, as if we are passing through a series of different rooms or recalling the flickering episodes of a dream. The viewer is invited, indeed obliged, to participate in an effort to patch together the clues and fill in what is not actually there. Anything consistent that we might perceive - erotic or sinister, harmless or harmful – in fact takes place in our own imagination. The artist himself does nothing more than suggest.

The exhibition’s title refers to Susan Sontag’s landmark 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” and its attempt to distinguish between the actions of looking (for the most part voluntary) and staring (a compulsion). “Traditional art invites a look,“ she wrote. “Art that's silent engenders a stare. In silent art, there is no release from attention.“

Born in 1981 in Banja Luca, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Drago Persic lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, from 2002-7 under Muntean/ Rosenblum, Elke Krystufek and Hans Scheirl.

The artist’s work will be presented at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2007.

For further information about the exhibition please contact Kerstin Engholm,
T +43 1 585 73 37.