Its all over now baby blue!

Orsolya Drozdik Flux Gallery exhibition examines the interplay between different approaches to making art. Drozdik exhibits paintings that subvert styles and painting techniques hitherto confined to the rigid systems and terms of traditional art history. Her references and techniques are vertiginous and eclectic, but at the same time disciplined and systematic. Brimming with expository, sometimes controversial references to styles and genres, Drozdik’s new work evidences a return to a her critical practice of painting, which she initiated in the first half of the 1980s in the series Biological Metaphors and Art History and Me. A few pieces from these painting installations will be exhibited along with the new series in the current show.

While It’s All Over Now Baby Blue is a sequel, conceptually, to the work was made in the 1980s, the painting techniques it showcases are quite different. At first sight, it seems as if the paintings’ stratum of complex meanings is layered by an underlying minimalist or geometric abstract style. In fact, the exchange between stylistic languages, visual forms and painterly traces stages the critical aspect of this work.

The rich reference system unfolded in the exhibition, coupled with its implicit criticality is deployed not only to underscore the seemingly illusory perception of art historical styles but also to transform the gallery. Evocative of modernism styles, the exhibition offers a wry re-examination of this legacy, but also a sense of something happy or carefree, unburdened by the past. Some of the paintings are thus windows into art history, but they are also personal, experienced and constantly present.

The viewer is forced to negotiate between the legitimate and accepted forms and what seem to be arbitrary artistic revisions. Drozdik seeks out the obvious through the inaccessible, and in so doing poses questions about disorder, resemblance and contestation. We do not suppose that her paintings were made by chance, yet accident often obviously present. She moves between individual and institutional spheres, from the imagined to the actual, from contemplation to mediation, and through disruption to construction. At the same times, the work relaxes or voids the pressures of historical prejudice and contradiction, repudiating the polarities between good or bad, true or false, painting or video.

Drozdik’s forty-year artistic career has been characterized by engagement with systematic methods of investigation and individual vision accompanied by an openness to material and generic experimentation. The different “chapters” of her work might seem fragmented or arbitrary, but if carefully examined they reveal an often painstakingly exact and coherent approach that unfolds as a dialogue between history and contingency, body and material, self and world.

Flux Gallery show a selection of paintings and associated performance photos by Drozdik made between 2012 and 2015.