b. 1961, Maribor, Slovenia
lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Swiss artist Mitja Tušek has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and America since the mid-80s. His paintings exist between figuration and abstraction, a place from which the artists creates compositions that are never completely evacuated from their earthly origins. The materials used by Tušek are part of this ambivalence. Through their characteristics of light absorption and light reflection, wax, lead, and interference pigments work together to produce ambiguous perceptions between media and imagery, resulting in a palpable visual presence.

Frieze – Mitja Tusek
In 1983, Michelangelo Antonioni exhibited a series of ‘paintings’ at the Galleria de Arte Moderna in Rome. ‘Paintings’ only in the sense that he originally produced a series of miniature landscapes, which he then photographed and enlarged to hundreds of times the original size. As in his film, Blow-Up (1966), the resultant images must literally be deciphered by the viewer. Looking at Mitja Tusek’s recent series of paintings, one also thinks of an image about an image; a reflection upon a reflection. Tusek, like Antonioni, is interested in process ­ the way in which a work nears completion, nears the moment when it is mediated by the viewer.