Nikola Ukić: About the Sense of Possibilities

The limits of possibility

Nikola Ukić's artistic practice is characterised by growth and decay, standing as it were for a metaphor of the ecology of capitalism, as many critics point out, although he does not formulate a direct relationship between the two concepts. His reflections revolve around fundamental questions of artistic work, and he takes up the propulsive traditions of the 1960s of the readymade and minimal, with which sculpture consciously and radically turned away from representative and monumental concepts. Nikola Ukić's work aims to critically reinterpret sculptural strategies, addressing the crisis of coherent bodily experiences and the relationship between authenticity and fiction. Works such as his polyurethane cubes "They breathe out as they rise" illustrate this. Mixed with different doses of colour pigments, the polyurethane cubes reach their maximum volume when they have assumed the size of their mould and gradually deflate again at their own pace. Their formation is subject to a permanent transformation that makes them as flexible and fragile as the human body. However, there is no linear ageing process here - a shrunken cube is in no way inferior to a new and smooth one. It is no coincidence that Ukić's exhibitions are repeatedly compared to Zen gardens, because in them nature and human labour are articulated, not apologetically disharmonious, but in a new form of growth and being that resembles a new ecology, which seems to be based on the investigation of the boundaries of nature and culture, the living and the dead, growth and permanence. Ukić's ecology results from his reflection on form. He insists on its irreducibility and our ability to endure it. In this sense, his practice explores the limits of what is possible to juxtapose without neutralising it. Nikola Ukić is interested in the idea of how bodily masses can be imprinted on a surface without representing this in a mimetic realism.