Artist:
Tobias Putrih (born 1972 in Kranj, Slovenia; lives and works in Cambridge, USA and Ljubljana, Slovenia).

Description:
Solo exhibition at Meulensteen Gallery, New York, on view from May 1, 2011 to June 25, 2011.

“Rooted in the ideals of high modernism, Putrih’s intricate structures conjure notions of the sublime but infuse them with a gentle humor. When Language Goes on Holiday includes two large installations by the artist, Apartment and Patio(Solaris), both of which combine simple modular elements to create organic, quasi-functional spaces. For Apartment, Putrih has designed a new system of black aluminum panels that connect to one another according to a basic hexagonal grid. The panels are arranged to form walls, partitions, ceiling sections, furniture elements, and abstract objects. This open-ended system allows for disassembly and reconfiguration, enabling Putrih to fill the gallery in a non-hierarchical manner. Patio(Solaris), makes use of a system of cardboard tubes and curved plywood connectors that the artist originally devised for a previous work, Solaris (2009). In their current configuration the components form four distinct sculptural objects.”
—Press release, “Tobias Putrih: When Language Goes on Holiday,” APT Global.

“The latest from this Slovenian artist is a flexible system of thin, mostly hexagonal, perforated sheets of black aluminum that can be bolted together any number of ways. Here they yield abstract sculpture, partitions (some used for displaying chair designs by the early modern Swedish designer Erik Gunnar Asplund) and furniture. A mordant yet genuine utopianism results.”
—Roberta Smith, “Tobias Putrih: When Language Goes on Holiday,” The New York Times, June 23, 2011.