For the past twenty years, Slovenian artist Goran Bertok has been recording and portraying the human body, its fragility and
transience, which eventually leads to the very end, the physical death.
In doing so, he is not merely interested in wider cultural and social
aspects of the contemporary understanding of body and death, but rather
in the very encounter with matter as the consequence of a discontinued
life. Although in the spirit of the time, his photographic portraits
of helpless bodies have become rather subversive, this is merely the
expected collateral reaction of an individual integrated in the
conventions of a given space and time. This is followed by unconscious
referring to and interfering with the endless symbolism of the
phenomenon of death, although the artist manages to avoid it by
applying direct naturalism. However, the visual material on display is
always provided a wider historical, social or intimate context by
unconscious associations to the iconography of death as well as the
fear of the obscure and unknown, which death certainly is.
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