Irwin
IRWIN is an art group founded in 1983 in Ljubljana. Members of the group are Roman Uranjek, Dušan Mandić, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski and Borut Vogelnik. Together with the music group ‘Laibach’, theater troupe ‘Sister Scipion Nasice’ and the design team ‘Novi Kolektivizem’, they were known as the art collective ‘Neue Sloweinsche Kunst (NSK)’.
From the very beginning Irwin was dedicated to the retro-principle, which, in their words, “is neither a style nor an artistic trend, but a principle of thought, a way of behaving and acting.” This means that the visual language Irwin developed in the 80’s almost entirely consists of visual elements cited from Western and Eastern European art of the 19th and 20th century. Irwin uses motives from socialist realism and art of the Third Reich, from various politically engaged avant-garde movements, German dadaism, Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, and 19th century Slovenian religious art. They criticized art history and ‘Western Modernism’, which opposed ‘Eastern Modernism’ with its apparent artificiality. ‘Eastern modernism’ points to the artificiality of the western structures of art history that continue with the practice of excluding contemporary Eastern European arts to this day.
IRWIN, Nova Evropa, 1999, monotipija, 53 x 38 cm
