Explusion Sprinkles

6-9pm Thursday 24th June, at LUVA Gallery

An exhibition by Lenart Kirbis presenting a series of sculptures, inspired and developed from Kirbis' work and experimentation with sugar in lockdown #1 situated in a quarry, in Slovenia.

The multimedial work explores topics of simultaneous decay and collapse as well as addressing perseverance and entrapment, mundaneness in everyday domestic life.

Interview with Lenart

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am an artist and I predominantly live and work in London. My main interests revolve around aesthetics of form and ontology of objects outside the anthropometric context.

How would you define your practice?

Giving up on defining my work seems to be the most difficult part of my current thought process.

What’s changed for you over the past year?

The pandemic began about half a year after I started my post-university professional path. I experienced both sides, not knowing what was going on right at the beginning, then being extremely busy for a few months and after that having nothing to do up until about a month ago. This down time was very useful for me, but I still cannot wait to return back to our normal way of living.

Have you had to alter your practice or the way that you realize your work to make it visible/ accessible online?

I tried to avoid making specifically digital work as much as possible. Changing what I do did not seem to be the right answer. Instead, I used this time for self-reflection and experimentation.

What does your work aim to say?

My work deals with the paradox one must face when trying to see objects in a non-anthropocentric context. It strives to find ways of expressing this abstract concept and delves into finding means of doing so.

Who are some of the artists you’ve been influenced or inspired by?

I think I have been influenced by the works of Michael Houellebecq, Tristan Garcia and Graham Hartman. None of them are visual artists but their works have had the strongest formative effect on my thinking.

What intrigues you the most by the discovery of a connection or lack of?

I hope I am getting this question right. Accidentally stumbling upon a new connection within my practice or a specific body of work is one of the greatest feelings in itself. It often happens spontaneously and usually sits between the realms of empirical and abstract. Dragging my work from one to another (palpable to abstract and vice versa) and wearing them down is an important part of the process. I like leaving things and coming back to them at some later point.

Have you previously looked at the processes of attraction, repulsion, and longing within your practice?

Yes. Dealing with assigned meaning and associations is one of my main interests.

Do you see this series developing more into the future, if so what's the next step?

Yes. The shift towards a pre-existing form is relatively unusual for my work. Things I create are shaped in accordance with their own material qualities. I am using this opportunity to try something new and play around with ideas and shapes that make sense but also remain slightly ambiguous.

How do you feel the sublime plays into the work?

When objects are given personalities and human qualities we can start thinking about the narrative. This often opens up new possibilities but also deters from the true solitary existence of things.

What are you trying to represent with your use of repetition and clustering?

Repetition is a tool for building a wider gap between the observer and the observed. Clustering reminds (me) of 3D renderings. Anyone that has ever spent enough time to learn the very basics or modelling software will probably make the connection to particle simulations. This is a relatively new way of seeing - understanding our surroundings through the lens, distorted by the digital.

Do you ever experience strong emotive responses from objects found in nature or is it specific to the man-made/ processed?

I think nature or better, that element of nature that is hard to point to as an object, triggers even stronger emotive responses than the artificial. The lack of ability to be fully suspended in a natural environment is probably why it is so inviting and beautiful.

Do you believe the associations and meaning of an object can be obscured entirety by altering the texture and the surroundings in which it is situated?

Yes and no. I believe the object maintains its qualities, while its relation to other objects changes. One may argue that objects' function or purpose change when placed within a different context. Function and purpose are concepts used and perpetuated only by the human intellect, or at least that, which is alive. These two and other similar concepts give false impression of importance and ranking within the anthropometric system of values. In the most deterministic aspect, they should be seen as mechanisms, which, in order to preserve themselves, have to blur our vision.

Lenart Kirbis is a multimedia Slovenian born artist, presently based in London after studying fine art at Central Saint Martins. Often fluctuating in abstractness and process, Kirbis digital 3D renders are elemental to and facilitate other physical materiality’s in work, ‘continuous fabrication is an essential part of my methodology’.
The immersive exhibition ‘Expulsion Sprinkle’ focuses on the multiplication of an emotionally implicative single object, addressing the human meanings and concurrent feelings of attraction, repulsion and relation that are attributed with the works presented. Featuring moulded copies adorned in a sugary surface, the repetitive states nod back to his digital renderings where deviations in scale and randomness become numbers in settings.
Demanding to be expressed through an array of mediums, the reified objects succumb to the ever-present tendency to become a body of work, a piece, that is something more than plainly themselves. Part found-object, part cast - Kirbis illustrates the fragility in context and interpretation of objects, its visuality becoming a textured blur in relation to us. Thrown into the discourse created by humankind they become carriers of ideas, nodes for the associations to be attached to, with the intention of arousing our need for fulfilment.
Kirbis works express concepts based on metaphysical questions throughout carefully chosen mediums and objects. Attracted by specific forms that remind of bodies or other innate structures found his surroundings, revisioning contours and manipulating the tangible presence of nearly amorphous masses.