Artist:
IRWIN [Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik] (collective 1983 founded in Ljubljana, Slovenia; works in Ljubljana).

Description:
IRWIN select and remix ideologically specific imagery (rather than the de-hierarchized remixing of forms found in postmodernist architecture, where motifs and styles are divorced from their social and cultural meanings). All imagery can be identified with artistic and political utopias or dystopias.

“[IRWIN] does not only stand for a highly contentious debate with the historical experiences, myths, and claims to meaning throughout art history. [IRWIN] is also an embodiment of the ‘retroprinciple,’ a process of montage that plunders the store of material contained in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western and Eastern European art, and—in particular combines motifs from the art of the totalitarian systems with those of the great avant-garde movements. Thus a fictive ‘eastern modernism’ is presented within [IRWIN’s] ponderous framework, a modernism whose synthetically constructed interfaces question the schemata of western art history.”
—”IRWIN: Retroprincip,” Künstlerhaus Bethanien.