Slowed-down Journey
2003 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Roman Ondak
As the caption purposely admits, these drawings were made by friends of Ondák’s at home in Slovakia asked to interpret places he has journeyed to. The description of the blond artist wearing the same outfit and bag in places of transit like airports, stations or streets are faithful in straightforward (verging on naïve) styles. His own skill as artist is displaced and delegated to others with no particular gift in draftsmanship. Taking the role of a commissioner recurs regularly in Ondák’s work, other examples include Common Trip (2000) constituted with 128 elements, I’m Just Acting in It (2007) with 24 drawings, for instance. These eight drawings were placed in variegated simple home decoration frames to create a sort of storyboard for the artist’s life. For political, personal or economic reasons, not everyone has similar possibilities for mobility. Ondák’s act of sharing his memories expands the potential impact of art for a different public, made actors on these occasions. The interpretations give different viewpoints but maintain a certain continuity, as if it is the artist’s travelogue once removed. The repetitive descriptions of a walking man have interesting parallels with Francis Alys’s two-dimensional work.
In 2009, Roman Ondák won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Loop , the Pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republics, for which he brought the same plant-life and trees growing outside inside. This highly considered installation epitomizes Ondák’s work. With often discreet, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual, participatory modes, he succeeds in profoundly questioning the art world and its established quirks, exhibition spaces, behaviors like queuing, labeling or various pedagogical approaches, visitor experience, any misplaced preciousness about authenticity or authorship. Various tactics (asking friends for drawings) or forms (shoelaces for instance) recur in his photographs, performances, installations, videos. Borderlines are deliberately blurred between the exhibition space and reality. This is infused by his relation to each specific project context and by his own ongoing experience of changing Eastern Europe. Roman Ondak was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia. Lives and works in Bratislava .
Colors:
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Tony Labat
2008Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
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Jorge de León
2015Jorge de León most well-known work was a radical gesture, and one of his earliest artworks: in his 2000 performance, The Circle, de León sewed his own mouth closed as a protest against the silencing of citizens in the face of social corruption...
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Paul McCarthy
2008Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
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Paul McCarthy
1983McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
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Roman Ondak
2003This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...
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Trisha Donnelly
2007Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
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Thomas Kilpper
2009These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...
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Roman Ondak
2003This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...
Related artist(s) to: Roman Ondak » Irit Rogoff, » Joachim Koester, » Ann Demeester, » Annie Vigier, » Annika Eriksson, » Ariel Schlesinger, » Aurélien Froment, » Ceal Floyer, » Dan Perjovschi, » Daniel Knorr
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Ceal Floyer
2007NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist...
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Joachim Koester
2007Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
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Joachim Koester
2006Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
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Adrian Villar Rojas
2010The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies)...
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Karam Natour
2016Humor and Law, Kick of Duality, Point of View III, Selfie with Pan, and Thinking of You are part of an ongoing series of digital drawings Karam Natour has been creating since he was studying at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem...
