Opening Friday, February 20th – 6.00 p.m. Closed on Sunday and Mondays

If you are not paying attention when you walk into the space created by the young Croatian artist - an emerging figure in the international art world, as we saw at Manifesta 7, where Igor Eškinja was shown in the two exhibiting spaces in Rovereto - you could easily find yourself trampling over the delicate swirling patterns of a carpet made of dust, or else fail to notice the difference between the precise, large-format photograph of an installation and the installation itself. In this complex intervention there is a constant oscillation between that which appears to be two-dimensional and that which is three dimensional, even if the means used by Eškinja are extremely simple. His investigation is concerned with the subtle point where the representation of common objects and things (shown as outlines, silhouettes, patterns, drawings) becomes confused with their concrete presence in the exhibiting space. The photographs make the relationship between the concrete presence of the object, its representation in the exhibiting space and the photographic representation of all of this even more unstable. Reality and appearance become two terms with imprecise limits which exchange roles before a viewer who, in the act of perceiving must also perceive themselves. Without a doubt, the element of surprise plays a role in the artist’s work - originally from Rijeka, he studied at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts (where he graduated in 2002) - and it is a surprise which also comes from the simple materials used compared to the conceptual precision and extremely clean formal aspect of the works. These are always related to the exhibiting space, the surfaces which delineate and form it: the walls, the floor, the doorways.

Igor Eškinja (1975 Rijeka, Croatia) lives and works in Rijeka, Milan and Venice. At the moment the Casino Luxembourg’s Project Room is hosting his solo exhibition and in 2008 he showed his projects in Rovereto in occasion of Manifesta 7 and he organized a solo exhibition at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos. He also took part in several international group shows in Croatia, Spain, Venezuela, Austria and in Italy at Federico Luger Gallery.