Bojan Sarcevic: L’Extime at Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris

22 Oct 2020 – 27 Feb 2021

All Images courtesy of Galerie Frank Elbaz

Each marble block is scored with geometric cuts and hosts a functioning industrial freezer inserted into or placed atop of it. Like alien sarcophagi, the marble blocks in a deeply veined blue, green, or rose-tone seem to engulf the machines. And where you might expect to find food preserved in them, a polar topography instead forms along the walls of the freezers with an abstract noise-composition resonating through the thick of frost and ice crystals.

Three slightly larger-than-life muscular figures surround and engage with the marble sculptures. Their distinct postures and carved stone heads create an eerie unison. Contrasting with their seemingly unbridled masculinity, the figures are draped in delicate silk blouses cut in characteristically 1980’s silhouettes, while shibari rope bondage dresses their hips and feet.

The title of the exhibition, L’Extime (extimacy), sets a stage. The term denotates how even our most intimate feelings can be strange and foreign to us. On view are forms becoming something other than themselves, whether mineralogical blocks ingesting machines of artificial refrigeration or morphing figures, caught in a transformational process of petrification, as if fossilized into a new hybrid humanoid species. The whole is a study in oppositions—at once hard and delicate, ice-cold and exuberantly sultry, machinic and bodily. Sarcevic’s ensembles explore the technoid fascination of our society today while offering unsettling relics of a future in which bodies and machines commune with an intimacy so odd that it becomes an extimacy.

Bojan Sarcevic was born in 1974. He lives and works in Basel and Paris. Sarcevic studied at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France, followed by postgraduate study at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands. He currently teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Sarcevic’s work was the subject of survey exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2012), as well as solo exhibitions at Leopold-Hoesch-Museum and Kirche Sankt Anna, Düren, Germany (2012); Le Grand Café Centre d’art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire, France (2010); Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands (2010); Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2008); MAMBO, Bologna, Italy (2008); Credac, Ivry-sur-Seine and BAWAG P.S.K. Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2007).

Sarcevic’s work has been included in exhibitions at such institutions as Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2018); Institute for Art in Public Sphere Styria/Joanneum Universal Museum, Salzkammergut, Austria (2015); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton University, Southampton (2015); Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2014); Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2014−2015); WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2013); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (2011); Tate, St. Ives (2009); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2009); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2012, 2008); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA (2005); Tate Modern, London (2004); New Museum, New York, USA (2004); Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2004); and Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2004).