RUDOLF BUDJA GALERIE & Olyvia Fine Art proudly present for the first time in the UK outstanding artworks by Heidi Popovic. Exhibition December 3rd, 2010 – January 15th, 2011
“THE ART OF ASSUMED INNOCENCE”
Christian Pölzler uses the artist Heidi Popovic as a kind of advance party to make contact with the observers of his works. The name Heidi Popovic alone describes her love of ‘ambiguity‘. It is an amalgam of the nature loving Swiss child star Heidi, whose world seems to exist around the mountains and the neurotically obsessed psychoanalysts out of Woody Allen’s comedy “What’s new Pussycat?”, who in the German synchronisation is called Dr. Nikita Popovic. Who could ever think of such an idea?
Heidi Popovic is an enthusiastic observer. With wicked enjoyment and an almost solicitous (over attentive, fussing) and extreme precision the artist approaches her work, from the world at her feet or at her computer. A world where the exponents appear friendly. A world in which TV presenters smiling and full of understanding chat to their victims – I’m sorry – their guests, so to speak their new best friends for the moment – humiliated and anatomized. It is a friend camouflaged as Dominatrix. Friends taken into custody.
In a harmless environment hidden subjects become candidly exposed, exhibited, surveyed and overheard. The pleasant form, the delusional packaging, turns into an unrecognizable spitefulness. Friendliness is no longer an expression of goodwill or courtesy, it is a perfidious trap. This is what occupies Popovic.
In this sense Heidi Popovic is a grinning pied piper, using the delayed perception of her audience, to make them observe what is hidden behind the obvious.
Heidi Popovic is not Christian Pölzler’s alter ego: Pölzler collects, Popovic forms. For example, how glorious “Biedermaier” wallpaper turns into a composition of Gasmasks, vibrating anal plugs and Kalashnikov’s. People’s attitudes generally tend to say “ Cucumber yes, Dildo no“ but Heidi Popovic flatly refuses to discriminate between objects, whether they be a Dildo or a Garden Gnome, and therefore they are given total asylum in his pictures.
Balanced forms, symmetry and image formation, appealing colours and to the thousandth of a millimetre precise vector graphics, cradle us into a the assurance that it is a pleasant encounter and causes one to linger in front of the work. As with a picture puzzle, when you look you see a different image: carefully ordered laboratory rats nibble on that sweet baby’s face, a red hole punch closes in on a red stiletto shoe, a Gerbera is inserted in a condom, and the laughing “party tiger” is made up of anti/depressant “Seroxat” pills.
However it would not be in the correct interest of the artist to see ambiguity in all her works. Sometimes Heidi Popovic is simply explicit or as Sigmund Freud once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. Heidi Popovic is an artist who is easily liked; she demands from her public neither analysis nor a reason for his works.
But whoever is interested will discover amazing things. Popovic tells stories from Mozart’s Magic Flute, deals with Adornos radical political views, and considers whether Hannah Arendt’s arrogance is an unmistakable sign of her intelligence. She allows Baroque and German Romanticism to appear in modern dress and shows us how Don Giovanni lives today.
Her knowledge of proportion, colouring and picture composition and her perfect technique are the foundations on which the artist Heidi Popovic stands. So it may come as no surprise to learn that her favourite artist is Caspar David Friedrich.
Some stories are told by Popovic in just one word, for example, the cigar cutter is decorated with a Bourbon Lily and she calls the work simply and logically “Marie Antoinette”! Various artworks of her can also be entered like a room. Consistently Popovic does narrative interior design where the room is conceived as an artwork.
By the way, do you like poodles? Yes? Also minced?
Michael Rainer Director of Das Institut für Integrationstherapie , Vienna
NB: When I was a child I knew that Teddy Bears could never bite. However, since my encounter with Heidi Popovic I am now not so sure!
RUDOLF BUDJA Gallery London @ Olyvia Fine Art
www.olyviafineart.com/
