Volo Bevza & Victoria Pidust: Lossy
Galerie Crone
Getreidemarkt 14, Vienna, AT
We find ourselves between two poles: on the one hand, the omnipresence of images and their circulation. Information is no longer only accessible via news agencies and traditional media. Today, every person is potentially a news source with reach through distributing texts or images via networks such as Instagram, Telegram or X. On the other hand, we are confronted with constant manipulation and deliberate disinformation. Politically motivated campaigns use two different methods that amount to the same thing: first, falsified images and information are circulated as authentic material; second, authentic content is denigrated as “fake” and called into question. At the same time, communication services are banned or suppressed, which deliberately creates a lack or displacement of information. Furthermore, images no longer seem to be able to confirm what was, as Photoshop has long since been overtaken by AI and perhaps other discourses on iconography and media ethics are needed.
The two Ukrainian-born artists Victoria Pidust and Volo Bevza deal with the manifold dilemmas arising from this omnipresent “manifestation of uncertainty” in photographic, painterly, and digital ways.
Especially in times of war, images are a much-used instrument of political propaganda. The “war of images” and the “power of images” were demonstrated to us on September 11, 2001, perhaps not for the first time, but definitely very clearly. Countless works of art such as Gerhard Richter’s War Cuts or Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page have dealt with the brute force of images in the media. As early as 1985, Martha Rosler addressed the topic of media reporting and political campaigning in her work If it’s too bad to be true it could be DISINFORMATION. The video, in which spoken news excerpts and distorted images are remixed, shows misleading phrases used in the news. Through the deliberate alienation of language and images caused by technical interference, Rosler dissects the flow of mass media and questions the objectivity of reporting.
Pidust and Bevza are also part of this artistic examination of the media’s transformation and deformation of reality, which is based on a current excess of violence that affects them personally: in their new series of works, they deal with the war in Ukraine and the traces it leaves behind, as well as with the images that are created by it and disseminated in the media.
The title of the exhibition, Lossy, refers to the term “lossness.” It comes from a text of the same name by the artist Ed Atkins, in which he reflects on the principle of loss in the processing and compression of digital data, and in particular image data. Glitches in image files are often caused by the lossy reproduction of compressed image information. Pidust and Bevza work with these transfer errors in digital image processing programs and use them as a creative moment. They use the technique of photogrammetry as a means of generating a digital three-dimensional representation of the photographed object, often from their own photographs. In doing so, they take into account the fallibility of digital systems, so that the “loss” becomes an imaging instrument.
Victoria Pidust calls one of her series of works Irpin Bridge (2023). These are photogrammetrically generated images of real photographs of the destroyed bridge in the town of Irpin. The bridge, known as a “symbol of war,” was blown up to stop the advance of Russian troops towards Kyiv, while at the same time trapping the inhabitants of the town under attack. The images from Irpin were representative of the suffering of Ukrainian civilians.
In another series, enlarged sections of abandoned, destroyed cars taken with an iPhone are on display, which Pidust photographed on location in the towns of Irpin and Butscha. The oversized, sometimes expansive works show the decay and the irritating beauty of ruin, detached from its cause.
Volo Bevza’s works have no titles and are reminiscent of abstract, gestural painting. They are created in a multi-stage process, which also begins with photogrammetrically generated and digitally processed pictorial elements. The techniques Bevza use are both digital and manual. They create something new and yet show the reality of the present: the destroyed houses, bridges, and dead of the Butscha massacre, which he does not, however, include in his pictures in real life but as computer-animated avatars. Authentic photographs, digitally altered image elements, computer-generated renderings, and gestural painting—everything combines to form an amalgam.
Pidust and Bevza succeed in abstracting the images of war but merge this abstraction with their original depictions in such a way that they become a new image. In their surreality—as enlargement, overpainting, and manipulation—these images become a symbol of the brutal chaos of the present.
Pidust and Bevza work with the principle of transferring techniques into levels of meaning: loss in images becomes the imaging principle, cutouts stand as pars pro toto for the confrontation with the war in their own country and the handling of its images.
Again and again, we are reminded of how our own visual memory is formed and how we are able to recognize images and their events in the works of Pidust and Bevza despite the “loss” of visual information. The works oscillate between abstraction, image illusion, and simple image. This recognition is a process that the two artists have anchored in the works and their creation from photography, painting, and digital processing.
The processing of image politics, especially when it concerns the view of one’s own homeland, is an important means of demonstrating that behind the media and reporting lies the human need to confront the incomprehensible in order to be able to deal with the present—to process it.
Victoria Pidust was born in Nikopol in 1992, Volo Bevza in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1993. They studied at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule and live in Berlin. They have taken part in numerous international solo and group exhibitions in recent years, including in Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Munich, Vienna, Linz, Kyiv, Barcelona, Istanbul, Liverpool, and London. Volo Bevza was awarded the Artwork of the Year art prize by the VHV Foundation in 2023; Victoria Pidust was awarded the Mart Stam Prize in 2020.
Text: Christina Lehnert
curated by
Galerie Crone
Getreidemarkt 14, Vienna, AT
As part of the gallery festival "Curated by", Crone Wien presents the exhibition 2022 which is conceived by the director of the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Eva Kraus, and the Ukrainian artist Volo Bevza. On view are 25 paintings, sculptures, video works, installations and photographs by young Ukrainian Artists whose work has changed fundamentally since the Russian invasion of their homeland and who are influenced by the war in various ways.
Kraus and Bevza take this year's Curated-by-theme "Kelet" (East) as an opportunity to focus in particular on a socio-cultural aspect that has long been known around the world, but which is currently gaining a new, brutal dimension in Ukraine - and thus in the conflict between East and West: The overlapping of real atrocities and their simultaneous reflection in social and classic media, in other words the permanent intertwining of actual events and virtual images, of authenticity and simulation, of fact and fake.
Since the escalation of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine at the beginning of this year our reality has shifted, but this was preceded by the ideological conflict between the “Eastern dictatorship and Western democracy,” the coronavirus pandemic, migration flows, conspiracy theories, and the storming of the US capitol (and with it the emblematic tottering of democracy), as well as other shocks that we have followed in the media.
The collective witnessing through simultaneous media coverage makes our reality more unreal, the drama more absurd, than could have been imagined—because it is all playing out live in front of our “digital” eyes. A physical war in 21st-century Europe seems outmoded, almost grotesque on the screen, the propagandistic information war, one might think, completely outdated—yet that appears to be the means of the time.
The various information and misinformation overlap. “As soon as you turn on your cell phone, news comes in and expands your daily reality into hyperreality,” says Volo Bevza, artist, and co-curator of the exhibition. “Directly on site, you can feel the war, but most of all, it is ‘experienced’ digitally. This hybridity of our perception brings with it the idea of a flexible, adaptable, multiform, and cross-platform image that merges with software and digital media—just as information about war does.”
This overlaying and blending of information and images is the subject of the exhibition 2022 as part of Curated by. Only Ukrainian artists were deliberately selected, for whom the clash between real war and the hybrid-virtual perception of war may feel particularly bizarre and disturbing. This raises the question of how such drastic experiences are reflected upon and how the reporting changes artistic scrutiny. Through and with the impressions of the current situation, the multimedia exhibition serves to make individual voices visible. Anticipatory works from previous years and updated works are shown in equal measure. Analog and digital means blur, especially in painting and photography. This is indirectly a testimony to the experiential shift in perspectives through the hybrid perception of a hyperreality that takes shape in a very painful and analog way.
In Victoria Pidust’s works, generated image worlds overlap with analog photography. For this purpose, she uses photogrammetry software and highly magnified snapshots from her iPhone. During the war, in April 2022 in Kiev, she scanned a shattered screen of a shopping mall destroyed by war damage to render “natural” looking landscape images, which she in turn decontextualized with building components from a Berlin construction site. Zoomed-in on and isolated details can be decoded as danger spots and signal alertness. With the associative mixture of hybrid visual material, she demonstrates the readiness of our perception to be manipulated.
The works of Yevgenia Belorusets, on the other hand, seem documentary at first glance. Her war diaries from the spring of 2022 have become famous through their daily broadcast in Spiegel online. Already in the work Please don't take my picture! Or they'll shoot me tomorrow from 2015, the artist addressed media deception by adapting Today’s Paper, a fictional journal, and dealt with the dichotomy of “private-public” and “personal-general.” In her current engagement, she confronts the issue of reception and enlightenment in private life as well as in the public sphere through artistic and also literary means. She subjects everything to a “reality check”, her simultaneous questioning creates new, concurrent realities.
Artem Volokitin translates the anxieties of the digital image into traditional oil paintings—an alliance of believable materiality and flawed artificiality of spectacle. In an almost medieval painting technique, destructive moments are transformed into ecstatic states. In imposing tableaux, beauty and approaching nightmare meet in grand gestures.
In Happiness 100%, Dariia Kuzmych explores the vulnerability of the human body through a digital avatar in the form of a female model. One experiences how the changes, transformations, and metamorphoses of the body that are impossible in a physical world can be represented virtually in a very believable and painful way—and in doing so, the digital space with its own laws and possibilities expands our basic conceptions. Digital “body extensions” do not completely replace the analog medium in Kuzmych's work; recently created delicate watercolors decipher real injuries.
In his painterly-digital approach, Volo Bevza repeatedly deals with destruction: physical destruction overlaps in his work with the translation losses of a digital software, which in turn is transferred alienated into the medium of painting. Here, realities intermingle; superimpositions and the filter of the “soft image” temper dystopian situations, while painterly structures overlay documentary appropriation. His paintings are exaggerated, charged places of a frightening, existing reality.
We would like to thank 4Spaces & ZigZagZurich for their kind support of the exhibition.
Hot Little Pool (Vol. 1)
Lobe Block
Böttgerstraße 16, 13357 Berlin
Hot Little Pool is a cross-disciplinary artists’ network that focuses on discovering and augmenting realities where analog, digital, and virtual forms of expression converge.
“Hot Little Pool” is intended to be taken literally; the artists chosen are representative of a young, progressive pool of creatives who actively influence one another and build a loose network of relationships.
With the exhibition Hot Little Pool Vol. 1, a diverse variety of works from different media will be presented together for the first time at Lobe Block Berlin, a brutalist terrace building, designed by Berlin’s renowned architect’s offices Brandlhuber + Emde and Burlon / Muck Petzet Architekten.
The 17 participating artists’ bodies of work are mostly transmedial, including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film and installation. Even though the works are not explicitly related to one another, there is still a common thread. They come closer to a notion of Hyperreality – “in terms of elimination of a divide between reality and simulation”, to say it in the words of American music director and writer Lil Internet. As a result, the artists tackle related topic units, such as reality vs. fiction, man and machine, dream and trauma, which they individually question and comment on.
The curatorial team of Hot Little Pool is made up of Berlin-based Ukrainian artists Victoria Pidust and Volo Bevza, as well as art curator Katja Andreae.
The three have been working together since they first met in 2020. They came up with the concept for Hot Little Pool as a result of their prior expertise and thematic focus.
Volo Bevza: Softimage
WTFoundation
Striletska 4-6 Kyiv, Ukraine
Volo Bevza: Bigibans
Fahrenheit Space
Charlottenstr. 2, Berlin 10967
Netz Werke
The exhibited works by Silke Albrecht, Volo Bevza, Kamilla Bischof, Olga Jakob, Markus Saile, and Erik Swars address the future role of painting in the post-digital age, thereby contributing to its reinterpretation.
No artistic medium has been attributed as many positive and negative qualities as painting, which along with sculpture, is by far the world’s oldest art form. This is precisely why, with the advent of new, particularly digital means of expression, it has come under increasing pressure to legitimate itself. What role does traditional panel painting play when algorithms are painting pictures? Can a medium with such a long history be considered state of the art and able to react to the problems of today? The works gathered here answer these questions with a resounding yes.
The artists in the exhibition actively seek to cross the boundaries of the genre. They question the alleged isolation of the canvas, revealing that the threshold between digital and painterly processes is merely
a matter of perception. But they also reference the speci c qualities of the medium. They experiment
with the materiality of paint and canvas, emphasize painterly gestures, and thus reveal the potential of art that is human and can do more than simply di erentiate between zero and one. (...)
The works of Volo Bevza are also situated along this fault line—but under di erent circumstances. Bevza is concerned with the ubiquitousness of the Internet and its effect on our daily lives. The way we look at pictures has particularly changed in recent years. Bevza’s focus is on the relevance of panel painting in the post-digital age. In his artistic practice visual information is translated via software and then transferred to canvas. Abstraction is achieved through digital processes as well as painting, whose alleged illusionism is revealed to be a lie. The transformation from the real to the digital and nally into the analog painting leads multiple connotations of the painterly result. This demonstrates the unique potential of intertwining digital, computer-generated art with the painter’s own handwriting.
High Noon
A light breeze. Water dripping, a clock ticking.
The tension is immense and keeps growing. Breathing is hard. It is slowly getting unbearable. It will all be over soon, but for now time seems infinite.
The scenery is equally before and after the climax. A dragging heaviness competes against a redeeming levity. Petrified and melting, inside and outside of form. In the space itself, as in every object it is constructed out of.
A gun cocked. In the blink of an eye, all ambiguity between ease and suspense spills into a single story. The trigger pulled. Seconds turn into years. Eyes follow like echoes. The redeemer is a gunshot away.
With works by Volo Bevza, Neckar Doll, Ina Aloisia Ebenberger, Judith Gattermayr, Lenard Giller, Sebastian Lou, Mimi Neitsch, Felix Pöchhacker, Aiko Shimotsuma and Kiky Thomanek.
Curated by Amanda Burzić and Edgar Lessig at Wanja Hack.
Two Ages: Young
Crone Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition „Two Ages: Young“ in its project space Crone Side, located on Tempelhofer Damm nearby the legendary Tempelhof airport and the art fair Art Berlin Space, on the occasion of this year’s Art Week Berlin.
The exhibition „Two Ages: Young“ addresses the theme of young art in a very special way: 25 paintings by artists who were young in the early 1980s will be juxtaposed with 25 works by young painters of today.
The confrontation of young painting of the past with that of today will create an exciting context for a visual dialogue, raising a variety of questions: the genre, the medium, the means, and the age of the artists are alike—but what about the motifs, the narratives, the approach, the gesture, the form, and the content of the paintings? How do the works differ from each other? What has changed? What has remained the same? What does the imagery then and now tell us about the times, the people, the society, the art, the world?
Undeniable is that, at the beginning of the 1980s, a group of young painters came together—as a closed or at least associated group—and created a new style or even a new era of painting characterized by mostly figurative, concrete,
highly gestural, and vehement mark-making under the label “Junge Wilde”. Is it possible to imagine something similarly cohesive today? Would it be noticeable? Is it even necessary? And does New Fauve painting still—or once again - influence a new generation of young painters?
The young artists of the past represented in the show are now mostly major players of the contemporary art scene: Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Rainer Fetting, Georg Herold, Leiko Ikemura, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Albert Oehlen, Hubert Schmalix, Andreas Schulze, Thomas Schütte, Rosemarie Trockel and others.
Among the emerging artists from today whose work will be on view are: Tom Anholt, Volo Bevza, Kamilla Bischof, Amoako Boafo, Emmanuel Bornstein, Peppi Bottrop, Jenny Brosinski, Daniel Correa Mejía, Andrej Dubravsky, Aneta Kajzer, Melike Kara, Jake Madel, Robert Muntean, Sophie Reinhold, Stefan Reiterer, Markus Saile, Anna Schachinger, Erik Swars, Antony Valerian, Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Jan Zöller, Sahar Zukerman.
Perfekte Zustände
Perfect Conditions: Ironic overconfidence or raw reality?
Berlin’s Weißensee School of Art presents 50 new degree works from the sculpture and painting departments. The works on view showcase current developments and investigate the state of contemporary art:
Multi-layered works use imagery, text, sound, and digital data as a field for experimentation, transgressing both the boundaries of their medium and perceptions of reality, and testing the utility of artistic craft and techniques. Relating to the zeitgeist and to the essential challenges of art-making, these works speak to the senses, reflect how developments in technology and art interact, investigate the imagery that surrounds us, and question the systems that form our collective order. Playfully shaping new ways of addressing the relationship between the individual and society, they expand into social space.
Five floors hold 50 autonomous artistic perspectives, opening up unusual perspectives on biographical, historical and social conditions of the world, and probing how analog and digital spheres coincide – perfect conditions.
Curated by
Birgit Effinger
Michaela Richter