ADAM CVIJANOVIC
Natural History
September 8 - October 13, 2012
Cvijanovic deploys large-scale paintings based on the iconic tableaux of North American wildlife at
New York's American Museum of Natural History originally painted by James Perry Wilson among others
under the direction of James L. Clark. Cvijanovic re-imagines their work from the Hall of North
American Animals. He transforms the space of the gallery into a remixed diorama of its own.
Executed in his favored medium of Flashe and latex paint on Tyvek mounted directly onto the wall,
the works in the show reconfigure the staged, three-dimensional scenes of animals set in artificial
landscapes into backdrops for the artist's redefined subjects.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Discovery of America, a sixty five foot-long painting extending
across two walls in the front gallery, a monumental trompe- l'oeil of a littered room - the exhibition
space during installation - in which two paintings appear to physically crash into one another. The
larger one is a spectacular, prehistoric panorama in which creatures from the Late Pleistocene Era,
roam through an ecologically mashed up landscape running from ice age Alaska to prehistoric southern
California. On the perpendicular wall, the other painting, based on an archival photograph, depicts
the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. And so, in an art installation gone awry, a dark and dramatic
narrative unfolds: the brutal collision of time, nature, animals, and men. An America void of any
human presence crashes violently with an America of settlers chasing Manifest Destiny.
Another large work in the front gallery draws from a diorama called Wapiti. Here a heroic landscape
of Montana, set in the shallow space of an artist's studio, is partially obscured and abstracted,
obliterated by expressionistic, gestural brushtrokes, likely laid down by the studio's inhabitant.
As the artist intervenes with their habitat, the elks "reciprocate" and enter the studio space.
In the back gallery, the classic taxidermy animals from the Museum's dioramas are altogether re-imagined,
cartoons and corpses inhabiting a primeval American landscape. For the tableau representing common
White tailed deer, Cvijanovic replaces naturalistic specimens with Bambi and his little, Disney-fied
forest friends. A painting inspired by the diorama of North Slope caribou portrays the animals as
slaughtered carcasses.
Even though it addresses the essential ideas of time, extinction, human presence and intervention into
the natural world, Cvijanovic's show is ultimately not about history itself. Instead it functions as
meditation on painting and its meta-capacity to transform the real, the historic, and the imagined space.
Natural History is a visual essay on the magical believability of a painted image where realistic renderings,
abstraction, spatial illusions and cartoons are seamlessly fused into one.
Since his last solo show in New York Adam Cvijanovic has created large installations for Prospect 1,
New Orleans Biennial and Liverpool Biennial at Tate Liverpool, and for exhibitions at the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Most recently he participated in
American Dreamers, a show at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, where he
exhibited two monumental painting installations. Upcoming this fall is an exhibition, The Stumbling
Present: Ruins in Contemporary Art at Art, Design & Architecture Museum (formerly University Art Museum)
in Santa Barbara, California.
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Discovery of America (installation detail ) 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 15 x 65 feet |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Discovery of America (detail) 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 15 x 65 feet |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Discovery of America (detail) 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 15 x 65 feet |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Discovery of America (detail ) 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 15 x 65 feet |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Discovery of America (installation detail ) 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 15 x 65 feet |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Wapiti 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 12 x 18 feet |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC installation view of Osborne Caribou (8 x 12 feet) and White Tailed Deer (8 x 10 feet) 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Osborne Caribou 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 99 x 144 inches (8.25 x 12 ft) |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC White Tailed Deer 2012 flash acrylic on Tyvek 99 x 144 inches (8.25 x 12 ft) |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Continental Drift 2011 oil on mylar mounted on wood panel 37.5 x 58.75 inches each panel overall 122.5 inches width |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Mastodon 2011 oil on canvas 32 x 34 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC installation view |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Studio Landscape 2012 oil on canvas 11 x 18 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Santi's Ladder 2012 oil on canvas 11 x 20 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Rocky Mountain Landscape (after Albert Bierstadt) 2012 oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Unicorn 2011 oil on canvas 17 x 21 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Expulsion From the Garden of Eden (after Thomas Cole) 2012 oil on canvas 26 x 32 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Savage State (after Thomas Cole) 2012 oil on canvas 14 x 20 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Naming the Animals (1) 2012 oil on canvas 20 x 18 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Imaginary Studio With Deer 2012 oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches |
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ADAM CVIJANOVIC Naming the Animals (2) 2012 oil on canvas 22 x 24 inches each panel |