BASTIAN London is delighted to present Lullaby for Realville, the first solo exhibition in London by Vienna based artist Edin Zenun. The show is comprised of twenty-six small and medium scale abstract paintings which appropriate, distil, riff-on and assimilate music, utopian political philosophy, art history, lavatory graffiti and music. While these influences are not always visually apparent, Zenun configures these influences in abstractive form, a process he likens to musical sampling.
The desire to create something new out of something existing is one of the guiding forces behind Zenun’s artistic practice and is underpinned by Jacques Derrida’s theory of ‘hauntology’, where people feel nostalgia for futures that never materialised. While he dismisses this harking back to the past as delusional, even toxic, the discrepancies between the idea and the reality open avenues of discovery that feed into his work. For example, two works in this presentation are dedicated to Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), the co-founder of Orphism, the art movement developed by her and husband Robert that explored pure abstraction and bright colours. In reworking and ‘remixing’ the ideas behind Delaunay’s works, the artist creates not only a tribute to the past, but the opening up of new creative possibilities.
The exhibition is curated by London based Austrian curator Nicole Tatschl
