Marko Tadic
Past Artist In Residence
2008

In the recent works of Marko Tadic, urban myths relying on the aestheticism of punk rock, fanzines, comic books, manga, and B-movies, are merged with art-historical references, fairy-tales and literary quotations, into an organic unity. Tadic does not recoil from arranging these realities on to the surface of wooden souvenirs, paper plates, or wooden boards. In addition, he does this playfully, almost childishly, by using techniques with which many among us used to dirty our small fingers in our early childhood – felt-tip pen or ink. In this way, he constructs multileveled, phantasmagoric stories with only a hint of narration. As in all boyish drawing, be it doodles or graffiti on school tables or bedroom furniture, and evident on the wooden boards of Tadic in his latest body of work, it is possible to perceive a modified hero, or at least – a robot. But when the boyish passion for drawing is combined with the curious investigation into abandoned objects and a fetish for insignificant human traces, such as an abandoned address book, diary, or simply a notebook, imaginary beings find themselves in a rather overpopulated neighbourhood. Heroes taken from the remnants of everyday life evolve in accordance with the precarious rules and whims of that small, mythical world; while the rebus-like landscapes, with their inevitable subtext of transition, conceal the laws of creation of new mythical heroes.

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