"I commit to making my work as round as the earth and my performances as compressed as water. I aim for pedagogical meme pollination and maximum viewer titillation." - Ana Prvački
1301PE is pleased to announce its fourth solo exhibition with acclaimed artist Ana Prvački. Prvački’s cross-pollinating approach informs a practice that ranges from works on paper to video, performance and mixed reality. In this exhibition, Prvački debuts a new series of watercolors: tapping into a spontaneous and fluid form of sense-making through image and text. The technique of water-based painting dates to ancient times, and is interwoven into our visual lexicon as a ubiquitous representational tool through a myriad of cultures and art-historical spheres including fine art, illustration, and design. The precision of the hand combined with the fluidity and spontaneity of the medium lends itself well to Prvački’s formal and conceptual interest in the fluid transitions between analogue and digital, tradition and future.
Within the scope of her practice these watercolors often inform her videos and digital projects, honing her ongoing observations and curiosity with subjects such as bees and honey, botany, evolution, eroticism, Paleolithic art, and storytelling. The playful and often humorous paintings capture the viewer with their seeming naiveté, only to turn on their head and reveal latent urgent themes of the current moment–themes such as ecology, sexuality, and mental health, to name a few.
Ana Prvački was born in Yugoslavia and lives and works in Berlin. Her solo exhibitions and projects include the upcoming Gropius Bau, Berlin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Turin; Artists Space, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore. Her work has been included in the following group exhibitions: 13th Gwangju Biennial, Korea, the 57th Oktobarski Salon, Belgrade, Serbia, 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, Istanbul, Turkey 2015, Contour Biennial in Mechelen Belgium 2015, dOCUMENTA 13 2012, Sydney Biennial 2007, Singapore Biennial 2006, the Turin Triennale 2005, and the Bangkok Arts Biennale in 2020. The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago Architecture Biennial have commissioned Prvački’s performances. In 2019 she was the de Young Museum artist in residence where she created a solo exhibition in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture that won the 2020 Webby Award for its use of augmented reality.
As the Gropius Bau’s inaugural Digital Artist in Residence in 2021-2022, Prvački is taking up a series of interventions that materialise the Gropius Bau’s overarching programmatic topics of hosting, natural structures, and ecology.
