Nikola UkićAbout the Sense of Possibilities

The limits of the possible: Nikola Ukić’s artistic practice reveals growth and decay, standing, as many reviews emphasise, virtually as a metaphor for the ecology of capitalism, even though he formulates no direct connection between the two terms. His reflections revolve around fundamental questions of artistic work, and he takes up the forward-driving traditions of the 1960s, of the readymade and Minimal, with which sculpture consciously and radically turned away from representational and monumental concepts. With his work Nikola Ukić aims at a critical reinterpretation of sculptural strategies, addressing the crisis of coherent experiences of the body and the relationship between authenticity and fiction. Works such as his polyurethane cubes “They breathe out as they rise” make this clear. Mixed with varying doses of colour pigment, the polyurethane cubes reach their maximum volume once they have taken on the size of their casting mould, and then gradually deflate again at their own pace. Their coming into being is subject to a permanent transformation that shows them to be as mobile and as fragile as the human body. Here, however, there is no linear process of ageing – 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 with Zen gardens, for 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, one which appears to rest on an examination of the boundaries of nature and culture, of the living and the dead, of growth and permanence. Ukić’s ecology results from his reflection on form. He insists on its irreducibility and on our ability to endure it. In this sense his practice sounds out the limits of what is possible in placing things side by side without neutralising them. Nikola Ukić is interested in the idea of how masses of bodies can be impressed into a surface without depicting this in a mimetic realism.