For “Void and Compensation”, Antonia Gurkovska’s solo exhibition at The Fridge, the artist presents an oscillation of measured gesture that collapses medium in its gravity. Through video and surface there is an insistent pull to perception.

In the video work, Territory Gurkovska’s performative drawing marks the occurrence of absence and presence as an inevitable erasure. Her line is an episode of the body, recorded as it is erased and repeated before our eyes. This preliminary, defeatist act succeeds in its indelible transmission; the viewer is implicated as voyeur in this nearly ritualized act of the artist’s failure to leave a mark. Another video, Monks, echoes this perception of ritual and the act of viewing the seemingly banal. Gurkovska’s gesture is also spatial. Sculpting the gallery with in-building, there is a threshold implying a transition: interior/exterior, private/public, open/closed, demonstrated by surface and scale. Traversing the exhibition illuminates another episode of ritual and mark-making and the relationship between the artist and viewer is evidenced in the transformation of ground over time.

Akin to artists such as Blinky Palermo and Daniel Buren, there is a commitment to painting that acknowledges its environment as it heightens it, its execution obliterating its autonomy. Here, as in Gurkovska’s other installations in Chicago and Berlin, abstraction transcends the picture plane and space itself is rematerialized. The exhibition space is a territorialized ground, historically and perhaps hermetically sealed as a support: objects have bloomed and dematerialized but the primacy of paint remains.

Courtney Thompson

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