Tomo Savić-Gecan

Untitled, 2023

September 02 - October 07, 2023

Opening September 02, from 6 pm to 8 pm 

galerie frank elbaz, Paris

Tomo Savić-Gecan, Screen display of Untitled, 2023

galerie frank elbaz is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of Croatian artist Tomo Savić-Gecan.

The gallery first introduced Savić-Gecan’s work at Art Basel Unlimited 2023 with 'Untitled, 2023' a participatory performance based on an Artificial Intelligence algorithm linking Clare McAndrew's 'Art Market: An Art Basel and UBS Report' with randomly selected art news. The algorithm provoked changes in the light intensity at certain times and in certain places of the fair. Visitors were invited to go to the locations, unwillingly becoming part of the performance themselves. The various locations of the piece are announced daily on the website and on large screens at Unlimited and at the booth of galerie frank elbaz.

During Tomo Savić-Gecan’s upcoming exhibition at galerie frank elbaz, the position of newly built walls will change daily, according to instructions from an artificial intelligence algorithm that is fed by data from press releases and the placement of art objects from previous gallery exhibitions, in order to constitute 'Tomo Savić-Gecan, Untitled, 2023.'

Tomo Savić-Gecan, Screen display of Untitled, 2023, September 27, 2023

This new work inscribes itself in a series of works initiated by the artist during his representation of Croatia at the 59th Venice Biennale of Art, all while reflecting the artist's over 30 years of conceptual practice.

Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022, reconceived the notion of a pavilion as a fixed location, instead dispersing Croatian representation throughout the whole of the Biennale, while creating a discreet performative project that will stand out for its engagement with one of the most pertinent issues facing our time: what it means to be human at a moment when digital technologies are revolutionizing our lives. The piece triangulates its key tenets—the news, which is to say, the selective, subjective reporting on the events of the world; artificial intelligence, meaning the complex of algorithmic systems that play an invisible and yet dominantly insidious role in our present; and the flesh-and-blood bodies of humans, the baseline of human existence and experience. [1]

Looking back at the last three decades of his artistic activity, Savić-Gecan has been concatenating ever more complex sequences and layerings of infrastructural systems, institutional arrangements and human actions to operate together across ever greater geographic distances. As his works expanded in complexity and geography, their modes of presentation have tended to become ever more evanescent and intangible. In fact, exhibition spaces have, more frequently than not, come to serve as one final step in the chain of operations that his works link together, utilising human presence, infrastructures of display and ambiental systems in those spaces only to subtly suggest that there are offsite operations that the visitors have to discover for themselves. [2]

Tomo Savić-Gecan (born 1967 in Zagreb – lives and works in Amsterdam) has participated in numerous exhibitions in Croatia and abroad, including showcases at the Kunsthalle Basel, PS1 (New York), Kunsthalle Fridericianum (Kassel), De Appel (Amsterdam), Apexart (New York), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Kunsthalle Bergen, etc., and major international events including Manifesta, the Venice Biennale, and the Taipei Biennale.

[1] Elena Filipovic, curatorial text for the Croatian Pavillion at the 59th Venice Biennale of Art, 2020

[2] An Unsettling Shimmer, Tomislav Medak, 2023