VALBY, COPENHAGEN.- From October 18 2007 LARMgalleri is showing works by the Bosnian-danish artist Ismar Cirkinagic. In the photographic series Sons of the Bitches Cirkinagic focuses on nature, while he in other works continue working with themes related to the wars in Balkan.

The show Sons of the Bitches by Ismar Cirkinagic (f. 1973) consists primarily of photography from Bosnia and Cuba. The works are entitled Sons of the Bitches because they are all the product of something else – a violent seduction or maybe an aesthetic rape. The photographs where taken on some of Ismar Cirkinagic’s many trips, where he, in search for specific motifs, were lured by an different aesthetic then he originally set out to find, an aesthetic that constantly confronted his work.

“Amongst other things I have photographed the mass graves in Bosnia, but sometimes it happens that a different atmosphere or aesthetic seduces me, that I am disturbed by an unexpected motif. It’s like meeting a prostitute on the street who keeps on following you, despite of your polite rejections. I couldn’t shake the luring motifs. In this sense, all of my works are a product of something that I wasn’t consciously looking for - or more precisely - maybe they are the outcome of something that was looking for me. They were motifs that insisted on my attention,” says Ismar Cirkinagic.

The Bosnian artist, Ismar Cirkinagic, was born in 1973 in the city of Prijedor in former Yugoslavia. Cirkinagic was only 19 years old when the Balkan-war broke out in 1992 and he had to flee his home country. After three years in Denmark, Cirkinagic was granted asylum, and in 2000 he was accepted by the Royal Danish Academy of Art. Here, he followed the photographic professor Per Bak Jensen. The works of Cirkinagic range from photographs to installations and paintings and they clearly reflect the war and the loss brought on by it.

For the show Sons of the Bitches Ismar Cirkinagic has not left the trauma of the Balkans. In a series of “herbaria” Ismar Cirkinagic works with a poetic cycle, wherein the deceased human body becomes nurture for grass and plants and thereby take on a new form of life. For this series of work Cirkinagic gathered plants from different mass graves, dried them and mounted them behind glass accompanied with their specific Latin name and information concerning the group to which the plants belongs. Furthermore, he writes the name of the mass grave where the specific plants were found, how many bodies was found in the graves and so on. This series of work can be seen as an extension of the installation “Cleaning Time” created for Exit 06, his graduating show from The Royal Danish Academy of Arts. The installation consisted of a drying rack filled with clothes taken from the bodies found in mass graves. The drying racks where put on top of haystacks, haystacks that like the plants in the “herbaria” were harvested from the fields covering the mass graves.

The art of Ismar Cirkinagic is miles from the idea of l’art pour l’art, to create art for art’s sake. It is unpleasant, harsh reality Cirkinagic displays through personal memories of the war. He forces the spectator to look back in time and refers to a world that is unknown and intangible to most. Thus, Cirkinagic’s art is an important and relevant contribution to the contemporary art scene. The works and photographs depict the contrast between the breathtaking beauty of the Bosnian countryside and the terrors of the war, concealed under its soil and grass.

In recent years Ismar Cirkinagic has worked with the reminiscences of the war in the Balkans, amongst others a series of paintings “Farewell My Love” shown at LARMgalleri in 2006. His paintings alternate between abstract and figurative motives, where fragments of text often render a concrete meaning to the abstraction. A living room with holes in the walls from a bomb, a floor that seems to be decomposing or cooked branches and pipes that create associations to the present day’s version of the morass of the castle of sleeping beauty. Figures and abstractions flow in and out of each other and create a chaotic and suffocating mood in the works.

Several Danish as well as foreign art collectors have bought the works of Ismar Cirkinagic. At the moment he is participating at the Istanbul Biennale, and in March 2008 he is having a solo show at Aarhus Kunstbygning, Center for Contemporary Art.