Goshka Macuga
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Work from her oeuvre.
“Goshka Macuga (born in 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist working across a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, photography, architecture and design. She fuses various sources together into one cohesive, meaningful narrative. The Polish-born artist now lives and works in London, having completed her studies at the Central Saint Martins School of Art and w Goldsmiths College. In 2008 she was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Macuga’s methodology stretches beyond the typical confines of the artist, venturing into the realm of curatorship and exhibition design. She creates large-scale shows that examine her subject from a variety of perspectives, incorporating her own original works, along with pieces that appropriate elements of the works of other artists and historical artifacts. She strives to revive the ideas behind these works by placing them into a new, contemporary context. She most often cites the works of modernists or precursors to modernism, drawing from the output of such artists as Paul Nash and Eileen Agar, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger and even Picasso, along with incorporating various political and historical documents.
Macuga has likened her artistic practice to a voyage or a pursuit of answers. Her subjects are predominantly rooted in politics, sociology and ethnography, however they also employ quite a bit of self-referencing in order to create another layer of meaning through an examination and critique of curatorial and archival practices, ultimately devising a statement on today’s art world. In both instances, she adopts archival materials, surveying how things have changed, and how they have also stayed quite the same, the world reverting to a constant cycle through pro-social and anti-social tendencies. For Macuga, art is not merely art. Her works go beyond ornamentation in order to delve deep into the role of the artist and to use that privileged role to voice strong opinions on the injustices or idiosyncracies of the world.” –Agnieszka Le Nart