IRENA FRANTAL
DE-/+CONSTRUCTION
Karas Gallery
September 18 – September 30, 2018

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018, from 11:00 to 19:00 at the Karas Gallery (Zvonimirova 58) you can attend the process of putting up the exhibition by Irena Frantal, called De -/+ construction.

De -/+ construction is an exhibition by Irena Frantal who deals with the boundaries/or lack of them in media (in her case, the media of the book). The artist will build an exhibition at the Karas Gallery on September 18 from 11 am to 7 pm and from the moment she enters the empty gallery, the exhibition exists. Formal opening – sharp boundaries of the media: exhibition – do not exist.

The last day of the exhibition, September 30, the artist will intervene in her work by moving parts and extinguishing/cleaning up the physical part of the work. You are invited to participate in the process from 10 am to 1 pm.

“Dieter Roth did his own Copley Book in collaboration with Richard Hamilton, giving him instructions in the letters he sent from Iceland to London. When the print shop lost one of his drawings, Roth included in the book a letter of apology from the print shop and a description of the drawing. Copley Books are unbound papers of various dimensions in one box. They tell about the process of making books – these books. As a spiral, at the same time constantly spreading, but also confined to itself.

De-/+construction is a work, developed in situ. It’s a book that intertwines its space with the gallery space. Layers of elements (pages; paper residues, created by cutting page edges; folds, created by page browsing; hidden parts; photographs; drawing; text; letters, left out of text cutting; text sketches; bindings; binding materials and covers; tools; text silhouettes; erased text; letter templates…) create an installation that is fluent, soft and changeable. By constantly reading it and by page browsing, it is changing. The observer/ reader’s touch is needed to keep the book alive, and so the viewer – observer/reader is invited to read/browse through pages and parts of this book/exhibition. Some of the questions I ask myself in this work are: Where is the limit/end of the work/book? At what moment does the text begin? Is one part/fragment at the same time a whole?

And finally, is (any) book also an exhibition?”

Irena Frantal

Irena Frantal is a visual artist from Zagreb. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and specialized in the art of the book (MA Book Art) at the University of the Arts in London. In her art practice she explores the media of the book. She collaborates with artists of various profiles on projects that use the book medium. She is the author of a series of Book Art Session workshops.

Contact: irenafrantal@yahoo.co.uk

Supported by:

The Karas Gallery program is also realized with the financial support of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU).

The exhibition will remain open until September 30, 2018