CABARET VOLTAIRE

Dada Zurich

Spiegelgasse 1 CH - 8001 Zurich

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IRWIN
WAS IST KUNST HUGO BALL

Opening day 20 April 2010 – 06 p.m.
till 06 June 2010

In direct reference to the Last Futurist Exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1915, IRWIN presents the pictures of their series in similar.

Since 1995, when Was Ist Kunst was translated into icons, IRWIN started to select a number of works and started to copy them, following the tradition of icon paintings.

On the occasion of the exhibition Was Ist Kunst Hugo Ball, IRWIN will present IRWIN-framed Greek Orthodox Icons. The Exhibition Was Ist Kunst Hugo Ball will confront Orthodox Icons with IRWIN – framed Dada Works.

In 1983, the artists Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik, coming from the punk and graffiti scene in Ljubljana, formed an artistic group and called it Rrose Irwin Sélavy. The group would soon shorten the name to R Irwin S.

In 1984, the group co-founded a larger collective known as Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).

The fundamental NSK working procedure is called the retro-principle. As the name implies, retroavantgardism is somewhat paradoxical because it calls for simultaneously looking backward (“retro”) and forward (“avant-garde”), retroavantgardism consists in the recycled use of past symbols, images and philosophical ideas, particularly those that have been used by governments or other institutions to accumulate and hold power.