Maša Gala
Slovenia
Contrasts between real and virtual experience
Maša Gala is an emerging artist of younger generation, whose works of arts are characterised by continuous experimenting with various materials. By using building materials and different painting techniques she tries to surpass their classical use and create completely new application value for them or as the artist herself says »reproduce the materials as her own technological inventions«. Her painting concept is abstraction, a coloured drawing combined with a collage from assemblage of photos, old maps, atlas, newspaper and Internet articles with the addition of pigments in acrylic, oil pastels combined with construction nets, wall paints, bitumen primer, various varnishes, finishes and sprays which give the work of art a special brilliance.
By using analogous and digital media as well as classical painting technique, photography or sculpture techniques Maša Gala tries to achieve a simulation of a digitalized visual image.
The substratum is a construction net and a drawing, the artist uses collage to glue scenes of everyday life on them: various photos taken by the author or from the Internet, combined with painting and construction materials. She works in layers by applying pigments, sprays and colours to the painting so that she creates the appearance of a digital picture on a »screen«. A simulacrum of a digital medium with a simulation of the analogue one.
The paintings of Maša Gala bear personal reflexion showing a pronounced contrast between a real and virtual experience – between digital and analogous image. The concept of pixels, nets and digitality is being more and more pronounced in her latest works (Fluid, Memory lane, Mapping 2014), it is interwoven with organic, subjective painting, gesture and form. These are the media from the field of photography, film, radio, television – the so-called new media which conquered the human perception that used to be reserved for the classical art only. The new media have unique aesthetic potential of creating visual experience and are a global source of artistic inspiration.
Maša Gala plays with the objects and their functional and aesthetic components. Her use of glass prisms, which are known architectural and construction unit, should be pointed out. With artistic intervention she added the application value to a glass prism made of 8-cm glass. In this way she created a new distortional image. The Bauhaus school is doubtlessly the artist’s model of revolutionary creation related to the creation of her work of art which is becoming functional. This functionality is primarily demonstrated in Maša Gala's experimenting with building material to create visual images, objects or installations thus adding her work of art the effect of indispensable part of residential space.
In all her works Maša Gala emphasizes and investigates interaction between a work of art, viewer and the artist. If for example Strehovec justifies the interactivity of new media by the fact that the viewer is actually the end consumer of the work since he/she has to switch on the media creation or activate its meaning thus acting as a co-creator of the work, and if on the other side Manovich calls our attention to the fact that interactivity is not »a novelty in the works of art« since classical as well as modern works have already been »interactive«, we have to conclude that Maša Gala trespasses the limit between the two possibilities and consequently opens the infinite field of simulacra.
Nina Jeza, Artists&Poor's
Curator of Maša Gala’ exhibition “ON THE GRID ” , 5th – 30th June 2014
