Here, Trubkovich sifted through hours of footage of his family and their circle videotaped by a family friend, “sculpting” it into the final product, which features a score by Christopher Taylor and John Greswell of Menlo Park Music. The show’s overarching thematic threads are woven together in the film on view. Here, Trubkovich has translated footage of the sky into paintings and drawings of varying hues, adding an overlay of mark-making that suggests flakes of snow or the disruptive flecks characteristic of old film the ineffable spatial atmosphere of these works is akin to the unspoken task of unrequited recollection implied by the “Mama” works.

These works’ quiet nostalgia is reflected in the artist’s recent “Snow” series, examples of which are included in this exhibition. As a tragicomic figure from a bygone era, Bruce’s shadowy presence produces a dull, fleeting sense of loss, as well.

Indeed, their subject comes about through self-projection rather than perfect rendering they lie between the anonymous and the personal, oscillating in the space that separates the two. Like the “Mama” works, Trubkovich conceives of these as self-portraits of another sort. Here, the artist has taken a mug shot of the late comedian Lenny Bruce, disrupting and distorting the image beyond facile recognition. Unable to fully capture her essence, these works succeed in capturing the essential act of memory stuck in the static frame, Trubkovich’s subject is recalled from the past, where it will continue to exist imperfectly, both on film and in memory.Ī similar effect is achieved by the “Lenny” drawings also on view. The resultant paintings are ambiguous: highly intimate and humanely collective, they are images of her, and abstracted compositions depicting the portal of a screen they are evidence of her history, and by extension a description of the artist himself. Trubkovich further distorts these images before rendering them by hand in oil on canvas. Screening this footage, the artist focuses on a discrete moment that he elongates and draws out, a single second that will eventually yield twenty-four distinct and nuanced paintings to coincide with the twenty-four frames in the chosen second of film. This project consists of paintings of stills taken from a home video of the artist’s mother at a party on her last night in the USSR before emigrating to America in 1990. It is precisely through this revelation that the artist ultimately evokes the unfixed, liminal nature of recollected states, and the particular poetry that arises out of their visual manifestation.įor this exhibition, the artist has produced three new paintings from his “Mama” series. Concepts that have consistently informed the artist’s output, Trubkovich addresses them here through the engagement and juxtaposition of painting, drawing and film, a treatment that reveals the productive tension between these distinct approaches. Snow presents a meditation on the aesthetic of memory and the fluid nature of recollection. This is the artist’s third solo project at the gallery. Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Snow, a solo exhibition of new works by Kon Trubkovich. Kon Trubkovich: Snow at Marianne Boesky Gallery 24th St, New York, from February 20 to March 22, 2014

Kon trubkovich wall fragment 3