Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Stains, Stars and other Catastrophes, an exhibition of work by Tursic & Mille, at Goethestraße 2/3 in Berlin. This is the artist duo’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Comprising paintings, works on paper and sculpture from across several series, the exhibition centres on the concept of ‘catastrophe’ as a creative principle. In mathematics, a catastrophe refers to the point at which a function, triggered by minor variations, abruptly changes form. Similarly, Tursic & Mille’s work – characterised by elements of collage, art historical associations, and a détournement of painting’s intentions – invites pictorial and semantic catastrophes to unfold. The catastrophe becomes the very essence of painting. After all, all painting begins with a stain on a support.
Presented for the first time are 160 abstract works on paper from Tursic & Mille’s ongoing series of ‘Papers’, initiated in the early 2000s. Comprised of A3 sheets of paper on which the artists test colours and wipe their brushes, these works act as ‘evidence of the painting process itself […] reflecting our way of doing things, our way of thinking about painting, and giving pride of place to the process itself in the intimacy of the studio, like a logbook, a diary.’1 Brimming with spontaneous energy, the compositions eschew all intentions, posing the fundamental question of ‘what to do’ and reinforcing the empirical idea of simply ‘doing’.
The sculptural piece Sisyphe (Time Mass), 2016–2023, explores this question in the third dimension. The work presents seven years of excess paint from the duo’s studio, accumulated on a single panel in the form of a growing mound. Here, the artists conjure a creative catastrophe of its own, namely the reality of painting as a Sisyphean task – a futile heap of material which embodies the artists’ endless attempt at understanding the world around them.
Several new paintings on canvas recycle source material from the artists’ studio. Depicting a pair of enlarged hands, Detail, 2024, is based on a printed detail that was used for an earlier painting in 2014. In the present work, the scotch tape and yellow paint stains from the original print-out have been transcribed and immortalised in paint. Black and White Piece, another oil painting from 2024, results from a similar process; depicting a vast mountain range, the painting’s upper left corner renders a tear in the original source material. In the artists’ visual realm, all landscapes are the result of catastrophes at work, be they geological or pictorial. Similarly, Tursic & Mille’s images feed on themselves, generating new possibilities in the process of their creation. The effect, the artists explain, is that ‘everything becomes still life.’ The original nature of the subject shifts to a radically empirical one: the painted object as a subject in itself.
Further illustrating the duo’s commitment to pictorial renewal, six paintings from the artists’ ongoing series of ‘Modifications’ summon the work of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), Antoine Vollon (1833–1900) and Jean-Bapstiste Greuze (1725–1805), drawing on their masterworks as literal and conceptual backdrops against which to set new interventions. The blank canvas, Tursic & Mille seem to point out, is a myth.
In an age defined by its endless circulation of content and vast well of material, Tursic & Mille challenge linear modes of art making and embrace chance encounters as the very essence of painting. The result is an eternal renegotiation of disorder and order, accident and intent. It is indeed by embracing catastrophe that the artists renew their quest for ways to express the world through paint.
Ida Tursic (*1974, Belgrade, Serbia) and Wilfried Mille (*1974, Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France) live and work in Mazamet, France. Tursic & Mille’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, most recently including FRAC – Fonds regional d’art contemporain de Normandie, Caen (2023); Consortium Museum, Dijon (2022); Le Portique, Le Havre (2021); Muzeum Sztuki, Łodz (2020); Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dole (2011); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2011) and Le Musée de Serignan (2008–2009). The artist duo were the recipients of the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca prize in 2020 and the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard Prize in 2009. They were nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2019.
Tursic & Mille’s works are in the permanent collections of the Berardo Collection, Lisbon; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; FNAC – Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris; FRAC – Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; FRAC – Bourgogne, Dijon; FRAC – Le Plateau, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle; and Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain de Sérignan, among others.
1 Tursic & Mille, 2024.
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Galerie Max Hetzler
Honor Westmacott
honor@maxhetzler.com
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