Modern Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Bojan Šarčević. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Šarčević’s exhibition at Modern Art consists of a series of new works made from commercial freezers, farmed ice crystals, and an audio component. In the exhibition, various readymade freezers – powered on and at work – occupy the otherwise empty ground floor of the gallery. The humidity in the air inside the gallery space affects the ever- growing frost within them. Eerie monoliths, they formally evoke both Minimalism and an abandoned supermarket. Over the humming of their motors, audio tracks, punctuated by distortion, can be heard periodically. Transducer speakers installed within the freezers emit vibrations that rely on solid or liquid particles to generate sound. As such, the thick layer of frozen condensation that has formed within each of them becomes the physical device for sound wave transmission.

The audio component of each work is composed of a different Pop song from the 1980s (from George Michael and Chaka Khan to Spandau Ballet, Billy Idol and Sade) that was significant to the artist during his teenage years in Yugoslavia. If that decade might now be understood as one of deep social, political, and ideological changes – an era of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher, the end of Communism and the dissolution of the welfare state – it was also the decade of the rise of lifestyle consumerism. Šarčević’s formal and sonic arrangement distils these disparate references – consumer culture, the readymade, Pop, lifestyle, nostalgia – in a new body of work that is mordant but also steeped in affect. The exhibition asks how we remember the era that started it all, while putting sentimentality, quite literally, at the core.

Bojan Šarčević was born in Belgrade in 1974. He lives and works in Basel and Paris. Šarčević studied at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France, graduating in 1997, and undertook postgraduate study at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands, from 1999 to 2000. He currently teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Šarčević’s work was the subject of survey exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2012). His recent solo exhibitions at Leopold-Hoesch-Museum and Kirche Sankt Anna, Düren, Germany (2012); Le Grand Café Centre d’art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire, France (2010); Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands (2010); Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2008); MAMBO, Bologna, Italy (2008); BAWAG P.S.K. Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2007). Šarčević’s work has been included in exhibitions at such institutions as Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2018); Institute for Art in Public Sphere Styria/ Joanneum Universal Museum, Salzkammergut, Austria (2015); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton University, Southampton (2015); Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2014); Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2014-2015); WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2013); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (2011); Tate, St. Ives (2009); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2009); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2012, 2008); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA (2005); Tate Modern, London (2004); New Museum, New York, USA (2004); Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2004); and Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2004).