The volume is dedicated to the work of New York-based Croatian artists TARWUK, presented, for the first time in Italy, at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia. A constant depiction of the human form – exploring the multiple ways it can exist and the flowing, expressive quality of the body – represents the formal result of TARWUK’s deep, probing research into identity and the marks that memories and subconscious tensions leave on our bodies, shaping them physically.

The artists, who were born in socialist Yugoslavia and grew up in the Balkans during the Croatian War of independence (1991-5), see their anatomically dissected sculptures as symbolising loss and conflict. However, they are also organisms with the potential for regeneration and rebirth: traces of beauty and the opportunity for transcendence can be glimpsed amidst the waste technological materials and signs of devastation. Drawing is another essential part of TARWUK’s practice: TARWUK’s drawings, which are fully fledged forms of expression, not preparatory works, have a dreamy and immediate quality, with echoes of late 19th-century and early 19th-century symbolism and the Vienna Secession, a period the artists see as a sort of equilibrium, a moment of balance between opposing tensions – death and beauty, decadence and decoration – that competed for dominance.

The volume includes a text by Mario Diacono and a conversation between Bob Nickas and TARWUK.

Text in English and Italian.