JADRANKA KOSORCIC
Blind Date: New York
June 10 - July 1, 2011
opening June 10, 6-8pm
The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Blind Date: New York, a series of portraits drawn by Jadranka Kosorcic. Over the course of the last month Kosorcic has invited willing participants into the gallery through the means of an advertisement: "Artist is looking for people m/f willing to pose for a portrait. Time spent 1-3 hours. Send photo to kosorcic@hotmail.com." They meet, sit, and converse- Kosorcic behind a drawing table, the participant in an open chair. The resulting portrait is neither them nor she, neither fictitious nor truthful. The stark figures composed of acutely drawn lines seem, rather, to chart the 1-3 hours spent. Kosorcic's portraits become a literal conversation piece where the voices of two and the hand of one meet, each revealing the subtle tendencies of the artist herself:
"The traditional job of the portrait - to capture a 'likeness' of the sitter-becomes a set of questions concerning identity and representation in Kosorcic's distinctive handwriting. For the Croatian-born artist acknowledges, through her setup and execution of the human image, the limits imposed by the history of her chosen mode and its status within the wider technological flow of information."
-Rebecca Geldard, London
"The portraits are situated consciously somewhere between the clean, faceless surface of a wanted photo and the sensible, amateur drawing of a loved face. It's exactly the broad spectre, containing the possibility of collapse, which shows the instability of the globalized post-modernity; its incorporation in a surface or a thread, in a normative or intimate intense way."
- Raimar Stange, Berlin
"Back to clarity, and back to strength. Kosorcic's ambitions in her practice may appear humble, or easy to explain, but the realization and revelation of 'a clear sense of the strongest part of a person' is not to be taken lightly. With each portrait the artist completes, another true portrait of strength is logged, and as this body of work grows an army and a catalogue grows too."
-William Pym, New York
Jadranka Kosorcic lives and works in Berlin and has exhibited extensively in Europe including solo exhibitions at Galrie Bezirk Oberbayem (Munich), Bloomberg Space (London), Extended Media Gallery (Zagreb), Artothek (Munich) and the Essl Collection. Most recently Kosoric's work was shown at White Columns 42nd Anniversary Benefit. Blind Date: New York is Kosorcic's first solo exhibition in the United States.