Although at the age of forty he is not the youngest artist, Mark Divo, a resident of Zurich and Prague, is having his first solo gallery exhibition. Divo carefully promotes his image as a “guerilla” artist, underground activist, and neo-Dadaist, and here he has included two groups of work that confirm his reputation as a shrill “obstructionist.” First, Divo has fitted colorful kitchen sponges into constructive, concrete pictures that he ironically calls “absorbent compositions”; not only can they wipe up dirt, but they also absorb all kinds of interpretive projections. This gesture is certainly intended as an explicit critique of artistic production. Divo shows just how explicit he can be with two large, seven-part photographic works composed like medieval altarpieces. A topless female architect carries a model of a mosque with a Barbie soldier placed on its cupola; Kalashnikovs are pointed at a little boy wearing an orange Guantánamo T-shirt; and a female doctor in a white coat injects an unknown substance into a half-naked woman. Dogs wearing glasses and reading books are enthroned above these modern ascetics, completing the picture and exposing the bourgeois idea of heaven as ridiculous.
Translated from German by Jane Brodie.
